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North Korea announces successful hydrogen bomb test

229 points by forgingahead 11y ago

meeper16 11y ago
Not for long.
hnamazon123 11y ago
Good for North Korea! It's important that there be Mutually Assured Destruction between North Korea the imperialist US-backed South Korea. We have nuclear weapons. Who are we to say that North Korea shouldn't have them? That just wouldn't be fair.
- s_q_b 11y ago
  Me. I'll say it. Any regime which systemstically implements slave labor, mass starvation, and utter lack of human rights should not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. We do not want mutually assured destruction, especially with a nation controlled by a non-rational actor. The principle won't operate. Unfortunately, it is now too late. North Korea has a fusion bomb. Once second closer on the doomsday clock.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    I would go further and say "nobody should have a nuclear weapon". We only have the one planet. Can we hurry up and create strong AI already, before someone gets everyone killed? EDIT: Somehow I didn't expect that offhand ha-ha-only-serious comment to kick off a massive discussion about the capabilities of AI. Fun, but not my intention.
    - sologoub 11y ago
      How is that gonna help?
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        Presuming we get its value function correct: any number of things that will have the net effect of no one ever dying again, and by extension no one having the capability to harm others, in addition to immediately eliminating almost every existential risk to humanity as a whole. The least imaginative possibility I can think of involves switching everyday reality over from physical matter to computation; no matter what happens in that computation, the sentient beings interacting with it cannot be harmed. Many of the folks thinking about and working on solutions to existential risk consider AI pretty much the universal solution (and, at the same time, consider unfriendly AI one of the notable existential threats).
        ars 11y ago
        Wait, so the same people you think are unable to handle nuclear weapons, you would assume they would program the AI the way you want? What makes you think that would happen? Be logically consistent please, either people will not set off nukes, and also program AI "correctly". Or they will set off nukes and program AI "wrong". In either case AI has nothing to do with safety from nukes. Strong AI is not a God, it does not have the ability to do the things you are imagining. Among other problems, what makes you think those things are even possible in the first place? No matter how good the AI, it still has to follow the laws of physics.
        JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > Wait, so the same people you think are unable to handle nuclear weapons, you would assume they would program the AI the way you want? I certainly hope the set of people with access to nuclear weapons would not be the same people building AI, or we'd indeed be quite screwed. > In either case AI has nothing to do with safety from nukes. > Strong AI is not a God, it does not have the ability to do the things you are imagining. Among other problems, what makes you think those things are even possible in the first place? No matter how good the AI, it still has to follow the laws of physics. The laws of physics would govern the computational substrate on which everything else runs; what runs on that substrate can emulate anything it likes. The major assumption I'm making is that we can successfully build strong AI (AI capable of self-improvement past human), which seems plausible but not a given.
    - paulddraper 11y ago
      Unfortunately, if that happened, I'm pretty sure the only possible endgame is a scorched sky and humans as living batteries.
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        Science fiction movies are not even remotely a useful model of the outcome of either friendly or unfriendly AI. Skynet or the Matrix are not even close to how bad or how fast an unfriendly AI would be, given that the protagonists of those movies have even the slightest hope. And conversely, no science fiction movie I've ever seen provides any useful depiction of friendly AI; we're not talking about Jarvis or Data here.
        pnwhyc 11y ago
        I'll admit that I'm a complete novice on this subject but I think Transcendence did a halfway decent job of showing some possible applications of friendly AI. That said, I don't think I'd constitute the conflation of any human mind and supercomputing as friendly.
        JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > I think Transcendence did a halfway decent job of showing some possible applications of friendly AI. Interesting, I hadn't seen that one. While that doesn't give a very good impression of what the timescale could be (though it actually seems fairly plausible for an uploaded human that just runs faster with more data but doesn't attempt iterative self-improvement), it does suggest at least some possibilities in ways I haven't seen in other movies, and in relatively few short stories. > That said, I don't think I'd constitute the conflation of any human mind and supercomputing as friendly. "Friendly AI" is a specific term of art, referring to AI that values sentient beings, and whose value function involves modeling and satisfying the value functions of sentient beings. (Its opposite, "unfriendly AI", refers to any AI that doesn't value sentient beings; that doesn't just mean "actively hostile", but also simply "doesn't explicitly care", either one of which would create an existential threat. For instance, a paperclip-building AI that sees people as another source of matter that isn't paperclips yet.) Almost all sentient beings tend to hold their own continued existence in high value.
    - adventured 11y ago
      Nuclear weapons aren't primarily a threat to the planet, they're a threat to densely populated cities. Five countries detonated 2,000 nukes over 35 years. You could simultaneously set off every existing nuclear warhead inside of Wyoming and it would have a negligible health impact on most of the rest of humanity. You couldn't come even remotely close to killing everyone with nukes, unless the global arsenals were vastly expanded; the US alone has 27,000 cities. Russia's entire stockpile could kill at worst 1/3 of all Americans, assuming they all worked properly and hit their targets. The notion that nuclear war could end the human race, is entirely a myth (which is not to downplay the actual damage such would cause).
      - jjoonathan 11y ago
        Then what's with the "enough nukes to destroy the world x times over" numbers I remember hearing? Have we really disarmed that much? Or were the numbers exaggerated?
        adventured 11y ago
        Nuclear war would severely harm the nations hit. Russia as a nation for example would all but cease to exist, as their population is extremely tightly clustered in the west; the US by comparison is far more spread out (Russia would have to hit every single US city that they could, in order of population, and that still wouldn't destroy the US, but it would clear out their entire arsenal on just part of one nation). The desire has always been to make sure everyone is properly afraid of a nuclear war, because of the destruction it would indeed cause. It's desirable for it to be considered off the table entirely, a true last resort response. There is a large gulf between an outcome that destroys all of the relevant cities in the US and ending the human race. The 'mistake' is an intentional over-estimation of how much destruction the whole can cause (Why? To properly cause immense fear, so global nuclear war is thought of as a humanity ending event; and that's probably sane reasoning). Back in reality, only a few nations would be heavily destroyed, and the amount of radiation most of the rest of countries would absorb wouldn't matter in regards to survival. Some will claim it would cause nuclear winter, destroy the global food and fresh water supply etc. It wouldn't come close to causing that. Nearly the entire planet would remain fundamentally just fine (the nukes would be focused on urban areas anyway). We know for a fact that large numbers of nuclear detonations (eg 178 in 1962) don't just magically spread globally and start killing everyone via destroying the food supply or other similar mass outcome events. Specific small areas of the planet would not be fine of course, they would be completely destroyed. An extremely small percentage of arable land could be destroyed, even if it was specifically targeted. Within less than a century you'd never know a global nuclear war occurred as far as obvious signs in nature are concerned, outside of the specific areas that were hit.
    - ars 11y ago
      I kind of get the idea of what you are trying to say, but actually reading your post reads like a bunch of non-sequiturs. North Korea not having a nuclear weapon is so much more important than nobody having one, that the two discussions have virtually nothing to do with each other. It's not one is just a slightly greater degree than the other, they are so different they are not even in the same ballpark. And what does having just one planet have at all to do with nuclear weapons? I'm not seeing the connection. All the nuclear bombs on earth would do nothing whatsoever to the planet, and barely anything to the inhabitants except for a minority of them. And then the sudden jump to strong AI? Hu? That came out of nowhere. You imply that strong AI has some sort of connection to "everyone killed", first of all, how exactly would everyone get killed anyway? Humans don't have the ability to do that, not today. And strong AI would, if anything, make it easier to do that, not harder. So your post really is quite perplexing if you actually read it.
      - umanwizard 11y ago
        There are definitely enough nuclear bombs to wipe out a large fraction of earth's population, if not all. The US alone has a few thousand. Not to mention that nuclear winter is a very real (though unproven) concern.
        ars 11y ago
        > There are definitely enough nuclear bombs to wipe out a large fraction of earth's population, if not all. No, that is simply not true. Not in the slightest.
        umanwizard 11y ago
        Well i am happy to be proven wrong. Do you have a source/argument?
    - ldd 11y ago
      For anyone interested in this idea, read "The Evitable Confict", the last short story in "I, robot", written by Asimov.
  - whistlerbrk 11y ago
    Agree with what you said and I'll underscore the 'especially' clause of your point regarding rational actors. I encourage people to watch Errol Morris' Fog of War which examines the life of Robert McNamara. In the documentary he states that a principle lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is that "rationality will not save us". Rational actors believing they are proceeding in the best interests of their countries can allow a situation to escalate and cause the mutual annihilation of their civilizations. This was the case when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were heads of their respective states. No one should have these weapons.
    - ars 11y ago
      > No one should have these weapons. But North Korea not having them is so much more important that even mentioning other countries in the same discussion is ludicrous.
      - timonovici 11y ago
        Who knows? They are just talking big - it's even more ludicrous for the only nation who ever used nuclear weapon on civilian population to still have them, am I rite?
        ars 11y ago
        > am I rite? No you are not. You are being simplistic and trying to make a point with meaningless platitudes. Intellectual "shortcuts" like that will not lead you to any sort of understanding.
        timonovici 11y ago
        If my comment was meaningless platitudes, what can I make of yours? My arguments was that it doesn't matter what one is claiming - in the end what matters is what you do. The americans are the only ones so far to have nuked other people, and they still get to keep their missiles. Don't you think we are way too forgiving with them?
  - quadrangle 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
  - zanny 11y ago
    The old doomsday clock was about the USSR and US having arsenals of thousands of nuclear missiles to render the world inhospitable if they ever declared open war. North Korea could probably kill a sizable chunk of the 25 million people living in the metro area of Seoul, but would otherwise not be able to inflict harm on the US, at least not yet. And we would be their nuclear retaliator if they attacked anyone - we know all their military bases, and a nuclear attack on South Korea would see instant retaliation upon all their installations. While China does not want to deal with the refugee crisis that would result from a post-NK scenario, they would definitely never fight the US directly because they know full well that doomsday scenario would play out in nuclear war with the US.
    - s_q_b 11y ago
      You underestimate the ability of international events to quickly spiral out of control. This is an n-body problem, and one of those particles is a borderline insane government.
- melling 11y ago
  Shouldn't they work on getting electricity first? http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/12/18/north%20korea%20satellite%20nasa%20lights%20OLD.JPG http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/12/18/n...
  - sbuttgereit 11y ago
    You would think. But I suspect the few people that have the power to make use of the nation's resources have all the electricity they need. Since they simply take what they want from the rest of the populous, the desires of the rest of the people simply don't matter enough.
- pinkrooftop 11y ago
  Is it really mutual destruction if North Korea has nothing to lose ?
  - viraptor 11y ago
    The leaders still can lose their lives. Which is pretty much what they care about.
- facetube 11y ago
  Here's a North Korean prison camp survivor's testimony from 2003. Try to read it without vomiting. This is the country you think should have nuclear weapons: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3071464/ns/us_news-only/t/survivor-soon-ok-lee/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3071464/ns/us_news-only/t/survivor...
  - joshschreuder 11y ago
    Wow. Thanks for posting, I had no idea about any of that. I mean, I knew NK was a serious human rights offender, but when hearing specifics really hit home how bad it is. Atrocious.
  - moo 11y ago
    Chang In-suk [1], head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association in Seoul at the time, says Lee Soon-ok is a liar. The Guardian tackles the question, "Why do North Korean defector testimonies so often fall apart?" [2] [1] http://uskoreainstitute.org/research/visiting-scholars/past-visiting-scholars/suk-in-chang/ http://uskoreainstitute.org/research/visiting-scholars/past-... [2]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-korean-defector-testimonies-so-often-fall-apart http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-ko...
    - facetube 11y ago
      Interesting. Do you have any information on what was suspected to be exaggerated? I read up a bit on Chang In-suk, and saw the Guardian's reference to forum posters on NKnet (who doubted she was imprisoned), but couldn't find any of the original posts or supporting evidence. This sort of stuff would be really really bad to fabricate IMO, considering the scale of known-true suffering going on in North Korea.
- yongjik 11y ago
  Erm, "Mutually Assured Destruction" sort of requires the destruction to be assured mutually, by definition. There's no way they can destroy America. In the most lucky(??) case, they might be able to destroy a city or two before getting wiped out. I doubt they could destroy even South Korea. (Sure, they can kill millions, but South Korea is kinda democratic enough to survive that, and you can bet my ass that the North Korean regime will be wiped out.)
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    South Korea is pretty much Seoul and NK can flatten (in theory) it with unguided rockets, Seoul is 30 or so miles of the border this is within range of even some field howitzers with RAP shells.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  Hm. Wouldn't have expected NK internet propagandists to be paying attention to Hacker News.
jayzalowitz 11y ago
The 5.1 earthquake for this bomb would suggest a smaller explosion than the bombs at the tail end of WW2, however that depends on a lot of things. Looking at this list it would suggest about a ~600 ton explosion http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/richter_magnitude_scale http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/richter_magnitude_scale
- caf 11y ago
  The kiloton-to-richter-scale conversion for a weapons test is highly dependent on the geology and configuration of the test site.
- aidenn0 11y ago
  Counterpoint: wikipedia shows a formula that puts it at 44kT[1]. However there is a note that it can vary greatly depending on the fraction of energy that is converted to seismic waves (this formula assumes 0.5%); That being said, 44kT is still way below what one would expect for a fusion bomb, and low even for a boosted fission bomb. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale#Nuclear_explosions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale#Nuclear...
  - DrScump 11y ago
    44KT is basically 3 Hiroshimas.
  - beedogs 11y ago
    Here's what 44KT would do to downtown San Francisco: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=44&lat=37.7564509&lng=-122.4245517&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&zm=13 http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=44&lat=37.7564509&lng...
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - kitd 11y ago
      Cool site! I selected London, England and it immediately centered the blast on the Houses of Parliament. How sentient is that!
profmonocle 11y ago
Is there any reason to believe they actually tested an H Bomb? Wouldn't that be a pretty big leap from low-yield atom bombs? It seems like the only evidence it was thermonuclear is that the North Korean government said so, and they're not exactly reliable. Meanwhile, CNN is proclaiming "N. KOREA TESTS H-BOMB" on their front page, which is a pretty far cry from them claiming to have tested one.
- huac 11y ago
  people are saying it's likely that it was a boosted bomb instead (deadly but far far cry from a proper h-bomb) and cnn is as usual profiting off FUD
- wozniacki 11y ago
  Listen to the audio of the event: http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265 http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265 http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/ http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/
  - kordless 11y ago
    Yeah, that sounds like a bomb going off.
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    For comparison, here is the link to the recent quake off the BC coast. You don't need to be an expert to realize the differences between a bomb and a natural quake. Natural: http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5169662 http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5169662 Bomb: http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265 http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265
  - trymas 11y ago
    indeed, this north korean 'seismic event' is different than other 'normal' seismic events, with exponential dampening. but is it still a proof of h-bomb? maybe just ordinary (if you could call it so) nuclear bomb test?
- 11y ago
horsecaptin 11y ago
Wouldn't this cause some kind of an earthquake that's detectable?
- ghrifter 11y ago
  It has been detected as a 5.1 http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/05/asia/north-korea-seismic-event/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/05/asia/north-korea-seismic-event...
- yk 11y ago
  Yes, USGS has detected it. The question is whether it was a nuke or conventional explosive or something else. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us10004bnm#general_summary http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us10004bnm#...
- biot 11y ago
  It might even cause a news organization to write the first two sentences of its article about that.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
atomic_nuclear 11y ago
Surely the first hydrogen bomb was constructed in 1952, not 1958?
- caf 11y ago
  Yes, Ivy Mike was in 1952.
  - allep 11y ago
    depends on the definition of bomb: Ivy Mike was not a weapon, was a nuclear device, as big as a building
    - arethuza 11y ago
      The Ivy Mike "Sausage" was big but it didn't fill the entire building - there was a lot of instrumentation for that test. There was actually a weaponized version of the Ivy Mike Sausage planned which was cancelled when they found out how to make "dry" bombs using lithium deuteride. You can see the Sausage in the pics on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike
      - allep 11y ago
        that's the point, was not a weaponized device, does not mean it did not go boom.
exaltedbaking 11y ago
Any time discussion of the DPRK comes up, I inevitably see many people repeating blatant lies about the country. http://anti-imperialism.com/2014/08/14/western-dprk-propaganda-the-worst-occasionally-hilarious-and-often-racist-lies/ http://anti-imperialism.com/2014/08/14/western-dprk-propagan...
- jqm 11y ago
  There is plenty of propaganda, sure. However that doesn't mean NK isn't a state dangerous to the world in which you and I live.
scottyates11 11y ago
Every time when North Korea wants to bargain for something, it tests a bomb. Nuclear crisis is the only chip for the DPRK to survive in between the US, Russia and China.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  I was under the impression that the whole reason North Korea existed at all was because China wanted it to be there?
  - WalterSear 11y ago
    As I understand itg North Korea is there because China doesn't want to have to deal with what will happen when North Korea collapses.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      I thought the point of North Korea was as a buffer zone so China wouldn't have to share a border with a potentially hostile country like US-friendly South Korea. That may be obsolete, but I'm pretty sure that was the reasoning of the time.
      - simonh 11y ago
        The reasoning of the time was that China was trying to help North Korea conquer South Korea completely. Remember the Korean war was during Mao Zedong's rule of China and he was fully committed to a global Communist revolution. Where others might see a buffer, he would see a staging area for further revolution. By the the time of Deng, North Korea was well established and successive Chinese leaders have simply tried to maintain the status quo.
csense 11y ago
What happens if the rest of the world decides to strike first with e.g. a massive wave of conventional missiles and bombers, combined with a ton of defensive mines air-dropped into the DMZ? Would it be enough to take out North Korea's nuclear capability and cripple troop encampments on the DMZ enough that they can't immediately launch a massive counterattack on South Korea?
- maxlybbert 11y ago
  I think the road to destabilization would be for the US to give nuclear weapons to South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, and then tell China to deal with it.
  - yongjik 11y ago
    "Hey friends, because I trust you guys, I prepared this special gift. I hope you guys like it." "Oooo a present! What is it?" "It's a T-shirt with a giant logo reading "FUCK YOU CHINA", with a red bullseye painted on the back. Like it?"
  - evanb 11y ago
    South Korea and Japan are already under our nuclear umbrella. It would be a major change in our nonproliferation stance to give weapons out.
    - maxlybbert 11y ago
      That's the point. I don't want destabilization. But if that's your goal, you can get it pretty quickly without any need for a sneak attack by conventional forces.
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      Well accept them into NATO and you can give out nukes like candy under the strategic arms sharing clause.
  - bzbarsky 11y ago
    Getting Japan to accept them might run into some internal political issues; there's historically been some opposition to nuclear weapons in Japan. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Non-Nuclear_Principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Non-Nuclear_Principles for example. That said, if Japan decided it _wanted_ nuclear weapons, it can almost certainly produce them itself very quickly (order of 6-12 months according to most estimates I've seen). They have the raw fissile material due to their longstanding nuclear power plant program, and the general knowhow and infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_program#De_facto_nuclear_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_progra... has some more data.
sandworm101 11y ago
My money: a boosted device. A fission weapon with a drop of liquid hydrogen thrown in to qualify it as "thermonuclear". It had to be an h-bomb. The korean people have been told that the regime already has nuclear weapons. So any test has to be a marked improvement. The only way up from nuclear is thermonuclear. Whether that H contributed anything meaningful to the force of the blast is very much secondary (pun intended).
- venomsnake 11y ago
  > The only way up from nuclear is thermonuclear. Antimatter. Thankfully we have no idea how to make them yet.
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    That isn't too far in the future. Using antimatter as a neutron source to prime a fission device is not total fantasy. With sufficient resources it could probably be done today on the bench (ie not a weapon). Such technology would allow for possibly very much smaller and/or more efficient fission weapons.
    - randallsquared 11y ago
      Antimatter annihilation produces gamma, not neutrons. Priming a pure fusion device seems far more likely.
sandworm101 11y ago
What is the significance of the depth being reported as 10km? Is that some sort of minimum for a quake, or did they dig down 10,000m to fire this thing off? That seems rather deep even for a large bomb, which this wasn't.
- mikeyouse 11y ago
  Initial reports had it at 10km deep -- which would've been far too deep for a bomb test -- they've since been revised to 0km deep, which is what you'd expect for a test beneath the surface. The 10km was interesting since if it held up, it would have likely ruled out a test, but it turns out that the first readings were wrong.
njharman 11y ago
George Carlin explained this here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMwXR-1oajE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMwXR-1oajE
- kordless 11y ago
  The NK bombs carry the -dong suffix on them, so yeah, he was bang on.
- graycat 11y ago
  Carlin neglected to make use of the Bush 41 statement "this will not stand" -- how could Carlin miss that opportunity!
  - pluma 11y ago
    When did we stop calling him Junior? There's not even a new actual presidential candidate with the name. Calling him "Bush 41" makes him sound more like a nu metal band than a former president.
    - tjakab 11y ago
      Bush 41 is George H. W. Bush. Junior is Bush 43.
      - J_Darnley 11y ago
        Too many fullstops to correctly parse that sentence. Or is it two? (This is why I like double spaces.)
      - pluma 11y ago
        Senior then. I guess my comment serves as evidence for why the numbering is useless for anyone not paying close attention to the sequence of US presidents.
lenkite 11y ago
If as a nation, you wish to be safe from US invasion/arm-twisting, you must have nuclear weapons. It is the best possible deterrent against US interference. Countries that do not have nuclear weapons must depend on US benevolence - which tends to change from year to year depending on the policies being followed by the US state department and administration. If Saddam really had nuclear weapons, there would have been no Iraq war and no ISIS today.
- GordonS 11y ago
  On the 'arm-twisting' side, the UK has nuclear weapons but are regularly treated as a US 'bitch'. Nuclear weapons are far from the only thing that can be used as leverage. Totally agree with you about the Iraq war and ISIS though.
  - bobwaycott 11y ago
    Perhaps arm-twisting is more effective when the power doing the twisting is known to have used nuclear weapons.
    - GordonS 11y ago
      ...Except, in this case the power having the arm twisted also has nuclear weapons.
efremjw 11y ago
The myth of nuclear deterrence is an interesting concept http://setbpbx.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/policy/PDFs/153_wilson[1].pdf http://setbpbx.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weap...
- simonh 11y ago
  I don't find the linked document at all convincing. To qualify as 'City Attacks' we would expect that those bombs would have been dropped on the largest population centres available as targets. In fact they were dropped not on the most populous cities, or on the most populous parts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but actually they were dropped on the port and navy facilities at Hroshima and the arms manufacturing facilities in Nagasaki. In fact the second bomb was originally intended to be dropped on the arsenal at Kokura and was switched to Nagasaki due to bad weather. yes they are cities, but they were prioritised on military grounds. For civilians, we generally think and worry about bombs targeting cities, but most nuclear weapons are actually aimed at military targets. The primary targets are the enemy's own nuclear weapons, military assets and infrastructure come second and population centres last of all. The point of nuclear deference isn't that if we have a war mum and dad will be killed, it's that everyone will be killed. The fact is we have vast amounts of direct testimony from US and Russian military personnel and leaders, both at the time and in subsequent interviews books and testimony, that deterrence was the primary consideration in their defensive and offensive planning.
  - iSnow 11y ago
    >The primary targets are the enemy's own nuclear weapons, military assets and infrastructure come second and population centres last of all. Humbug: "“The authors developed a plan for the ‘systematic destruction’ of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted ‘population’ in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin and Warsaw,” Burr pointed out. “Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se (as opposed to military installations with civilians nearby).” But other contemporary sources make it abundantly clear the Pentagon saw any person tied to a war effort as a viable military target. A now declassified 1952 U.S. Navy film on chemical and biological warfare specifically states a goal “to incapacitate the enemy’s armed forces and that portion of his human population that directly supports them.” With similar thoughts in mind, the U.S. Army had looked into radiological warfare and built deadly dirty bombs." (http://warisboring.com/articles/this-cold-war-study-is-a-catalog-of-nuclear-death/ http://warisboring.com/articles/this-cold-war-study-is-a-cat...) Civilians have always been targets and always will be.
arethuza 11y ago
Perhaps worth noting that North Korea wouldn't be the first country to bluff that they had exploded an H-bomb when they hadn't - the UK did this with some tests in the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapple
- stevefolta 11y ago
  The Soviets did it too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_4
  - arethuza 11y ago
    I think you could argue that the Joe 4 design was an attempt to design a H-bomb using a different approach that turned out to be a dead end - the US was aware of this design but never tested it. Whereas the UK just plain lied and continues to be evasive about the matter to this day - probably because the exercise was mostly aimed at the US.
    - m-i-l 11y ago
      The Grapple X on 8 November 1957 (a few months after the Grapple 1 on 15 May 1957) was a successful thermonuclear device[0], so it was only a short term bluff. Bear in mind that this was in the context of the British feeling betrayed by the Americans on nuclear research - from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Energy_Act_of_1946 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Energy_Act_of_1946 : "Implementing the McMahon Act created a substantial rift between United States and Britain. The new control of 'restricted data' prevented the United States' allies from receiving any information, despite the fact that the British and Canadian governments, before contributing technology and manpower to the Manhattan Project, had made agreements with the United States about the post-war sharing of nuclear technology. Those agreements had been formalized in the 1943 Quebec Agreement. In the case of the United Kingdom, these were developed further in the 1944 Hyde Park Agreement, which was signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapple#Grapple_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapple#Grapple_X
jensen123 11y ago
I wonder if this would have happened if the US hadn't been meddling so much? For example Bush's "Axis of Evil".
- nitrogen 11y ago
  After watching documentaries about North Korea with smuggled film, it would surprise me if the country could have turned out much different than it is now.
Tharkun 11y ago
Maybe they should focus their efforts on getting their food production going so their people don't starve to death. Just sayin'...
- zanny 11y ago
  You don't run a totalitarian regime in the interests of your people. Its profitable to be a kingpin in the NK chain of command. Its what the dick waving of nuclear arms is - look, we have a bomb, give us more free shit. And it isn't even the threat of war. Its a threat of jumping the shark so they have to be conquered, leaving the region with 25 million destitute refugees to somehow deal with. Just for comparison, the EU is having huge trouble dealing with 11 million Syrian refugees and only 4 million have fled the country.
theworstshill 11y ago
Imagine a world where every country has nuclear weapons and methods of their delivery - a true democracy, or a diversity of democracies you could say.

229 points by forgingahead 11y ago

Not for long.

Good for North Korea! It's important that there be Mutually Assured Destruction between North Korea the imperialist US-backed South Korea. We have nuclear weapons. Who are we to say that North Korea shouldn't have them? That just wouldn't be fair.

s_q_b 11y ago
Me. I'll say it. Any regime which systemstically implements slave labor, mass starvation, and utter lack of human rights should not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. We do not want mutually assured destruction, especially with a nation controlled by a non-rational actor. The principle won't operate. Unfortunately, it is now too late. North Korea has a fusion bomb. Once second closer on the doomsday clock.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  I would go further and say "nobody should have a nuclear weapon". We only have the one planet. Can we hurry up and create strong AI already, before someone gets everyone killed? EDIT: Somehow I didn't expect that offhand ha-ha-only-serious comment to kick off a massive discussion about the capabilities of AI. Fun, but not my intention.
  - sologoub 11y ago
    How is that gonna help?
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      Presuming we get its value function correct: any number of things that will have the net effect of no one ever dying again, and by extension no one having the capability to harm others, in addition to immediately eliminating almost every existential risk to humanity as a whole. The least imaginative possibility I can think of involves switching everyday reality over from physical matter to computation; no matter what happens in that computation, the sentient beings interacting with it cannot be harmed. Many of the folks thinking about and working on solutions to existential risk consider AI pretty much the universal solution (and, at the same time, consider unfriendly AI one of the notable existential threats).
      - ars 11y ago
        Wait, so the same people you think are unable to handle nuclear weapons, you would assume they would program the AI the way you want? What makes you think that would happen? Be logically consistent please, either people will not set off nukes, and also program AI "correctly". Or they will set off nukes and program AI "wrong". In either case AI has nothing to do with safety from nukes. Strong AI is not a God, it does not have the ability to do the things you are imagining. Among other problems, what makes you think those things are even possible in the first place? No matter how good the AI, it still has to follow the laws of physics.
        JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > Wait, so the same people you think are unable to handle nuclear weapons, you would assume they would program the AI the way you want? I certainly hope the set of people with access to nuclear weapons would not be the same people building AI, or we'd indeed be quite screwed. > In either case AI has nothing to do with safety from nukes. > Strong AI is not a God, it does not have the ability to do the things you are imagining. Among other problems, what makes you think those things are even possible in the first place? No matter how good the AI, it still has to follow the laws of physics. The laws of physics would govern the computational substrate on which everything else runs; what runs on that substrate can emulate anything it likes. The major assumption I'm making is that we can successfully build strong AI (AI capable of self-improvement past human), which seems plausible but not a given.
  - paulddraper 11y ago
    Unfortunately, if that happened, I'm pretty sure the only possible endgame is a scorched sky and humans as living batteries.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      Science fiction movies are not even remotely a useful model of the outcome of either friendly or unfriendly AI. Skynet or the Matrix are not even close to how bad or how fast an unfriendly AI would be, given that the protagonists of those movies have even the slightest hope. And conversely, no science fiction movie I've ever seen provides any useful depiction of friendly AI; we're not talking about Jarvis or Data here.
      - pnwhyc 11y ago
        I'll admit that I'm a complete novice on this subject but I think Transcendence did a halfway decent job of showing some possible applications of friendly AI. That said, I don't think I'd constitute the conflation of any human mind and supercomputing as friendly.
        JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > I think Transcendence did a halfway decent job of showing some possible applications of friendly AI. Interesting, I hadn't seen that one. While that doesn't give a very good impression of what the timescale could be (though it actually seems fairly plausible for an uploaded human that just runs faster with more data but doesn't attempt iterative self-improvement), it does suggest at least some possibilities in ways I haven't seen in other movies, and in relatively few short stories. > That said, I don't think I'd constitute the conflation of any human mind and supercomputing as friendly. "Friendly AI" is a specific term of art, referring to AI that values sentient beings, and whose value function involves modeling and satisfying the value functions of sentient beings. (Its opposite, "unfriendly AI", refers to any AI that doesn't value sentient beings; that doesn't just mean "actively hostile", but also simply "doesn't explicitly care", either one of which would create an existential threat. For instance, a paperclip-building AI that sees people as another source of matter that isn't paperclips yet.) Almost all sentient beings tend to hold their own continued existence in high value.
  - adventured 11y ago
    Nuclear weapons aren't primarily a threat to the planet, they're a threat to densely populated cities. Five countries detonated 2,000 nukes over 35 years. You could simultaneously set off every existing nuclear warhead inside of Wyoming and it would have a negligible health impact on most of the rest of humanity. You couldn't come even remotely close to killing everyone with nukes, unless the global arsenals were vastly expanded; the US alone has 27,000 cities. Russia's entire stockpile could kill at worst 1/3 of all Americans, assuming they all worked properly and hit their targets. The notion that nuclear war could end the human race, is entirely a myth (which is not to downplay the actual damage such would cause).
    - jjoonathan 11y ago
      Then what's with the "enough nukes to destroy the world x times over" numbers I remember hearing? Have we really disarmed that much? Or were the numbers exaggerated?
      - adventured 11y ago
        Nuclear war would severely harm the nations hit. Russia as a nation for example would all but cease to exist, as their population is extremely tightly clustered in the west; the US by comparison is far more spread out (Russia would have to hit every single US city that they could, in order of population, and that still wouldn't destroy the US, but it would clear out their entire arsenal on just part of one nation). The desire has always been to make sure everyone is properly afraid of a nuclear war, because of the destruction it would indeed cause. It's desirable for it to be considered off the table entirely, a true last resort response. There is a large gulf between an outcome that destroys all of the relevant cities in the US and ending the human race. The 'mistake' is an intentional over-estimation of how much destruction the whole can cause (Why? To properly cause immense fear, so global nuclear war is thought of as a humanity ending event; and that's probably sane reasoning). Back in reality, only a few nations would be heavily destroyed, and the amount of radiation most of the rest of countries would absorb wouldn't matter in regards to survival. Some will claim it would cause nuclear winter, destroy the global food and fresh water supply etc. It wouldn't come close to causing that. Nearly the entire planet would remain fundamentally just fine (the nukes would be focused on urban areas anyway). We know for a fact that large numbers of nuclear detonations (eg 178 in 1962) don't just magically spread globally and start killing everyone via destroying the food supply or other similar mass outcome events. Specific small areas of the planet would not be fine of course, they would be completely destroyed. An extremely small percentage of arable land could be destroyed, even if it was specifically targeted. Within less than a century you'd never know a global nuclear war occurred as far as obvious signs in nature are concerned, outside of the specific areas that were hit.
  - ars 11y ago
    I kind of get the idea of what you are trying to say, but actually reading your post reads like a bunch of non-sequiturs. North Korea not having a nuclear weapon is so much more important than nobody having one, that the two discussions have virtually nothing to do with each other. It's not one is just a slightly greater degree than the other, they are so different they are not even in the same ballpark. And what does having just one planet have at all to do with nuclear weapons? I'm not seeing the connection. All the nuclear bombs on earth would do nothing whatsoever to the planet, and barely anything to the inhabitants except for a minority of them. And then the sudden jump to strong AI? Hu? That came out of nowhere. You imply that strong AI has some sort of connection to "everyone killed", first of all, how exactly would everyone get killed anyway? Humans don't have the ability to do that, not today. And strong AI would, if anything, make it easier to do that, not harder. So your post really is quite perplexing if you actually read it.
    - umanwizard 11y ago
      There are definitely enough nuclear bombs to wipe out a large fraction of earth's population, if not all. The US alone has a few thousand. Not to mention that nuclear winter is a very real (though unproven) concern.
      - ars 11y ago
        > There are definitely enough nuclear bombs to wipe out a large fraction of earth's population, if not all. No, that is simply not true. Not in the slightest.
        umanwizard 11y ago
        Well i am happy to be proven wrong. Do you have a source/argument?
  - ldd 11y ago
    For anyone interested in this idea, read "The Evitable Confict", the last short story in "I, robot", written by Asimov.
- whistlerbrk 11y ago
  Agree with what you said and I'll underscore the 'especially' clause of your point regarding rational actors. I encourage people to watch Errol Morris' Fog of War which examines the life of Robert McNamara. In the documentary he states that a principle lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is that "rationality will not save us". Rational actors believing they are proceeding in the best interests of their countries can allow a situation to escalate and cause the mutual annihilation of their civilizations. This was the case when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were heads of their respective states. No one should have these weapons.
  - ars 11y ago
    > No one should have these weapons. But North Korea not having them is so much more important that even mentioning other countries in the same discussion is ludicrous.
    - timonovici 11y ago
      Who knows? They are just talking big - it's even more ludicrous for the only nation who ever used nuclear weapon on civilian population to still have them, am I rite?
      - ars 11y ago
        > am I rite? No you are not. You are being simplistic and trying to make a point with meaningless platitudes. Intellectual "shortcuts" like that will not lead you to any sort of understanding.
        timonovici 11y ago
        If my comment was meaningless platitudes, what can I make of yours? My arguments was that it doesn't matter what one is claiming - in the end what matters is what you do. The americans are the only ones so far to have nuked other people, and they still get to keep their missiles. Don't you think we are way too forgiving with them?
- quadrangle 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
- zanny 11y ago
  The old doomsday clock was about the USSR and US having arsenals of thousands of nuclear missiles to render the world inhospitable if they ever declared open war. North Korea could probably kill a sizable chunk of the 25 million people living in the metro area of Seoul, but would otherwise not be able to inflict harm on the US, at least not yet. And we would be their nuclear retaliator if they attacked anyone - we know all their military bases, and a nuclear attack on South Korea would see instant retaliation upon all their installations. While China does not want to deal with the refugee crisis that would result from a post-NK scenario, they would definitely never fight the US directly because they know full well that doomsday scenario would play out in nuclear war with the US.
  - s_q_b 11y ago
    You underestimate the ability of international events to quickly spiral out of control. This is an n-body problem, and one of those particles is a borderline insane government.
melling 11y ago
Shouldn't they work on getting electricity first? http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/12/18/north%20korea%20satellite%20nasa%20lights%20OLD.JPG http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/12/18/n...
- sbuttgereit 11y ago
  You would think. But I suspect the few people that have the power to make use of the nation's resources have all the electricity they need. Since they simply take what they want from the rest of the populous, the desires of the rest of the people simply don't matter enough.
pinkrooftop 11y ago
Is it really mutual destruction if North Korea has nothing to lose ?
- viraptor 11y ago
  The leaders still can lose their lives. Which is pretty much what they care about.
facetube 11y ago
Here's a North Korean prison camp survivor's testimony from 2003. Try to read it without vomiting. This is the country you think should have nuclear weapons: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3071464/ns/us_news-only/t/survivor-soon-ok-lee/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3071464/ns/us_news-only/t/survivor...
- joshschreuder 11y ago
  Wow. Thanks for posting, I had no idea about any of that. I mean, I knew NK was a serious human rights offender, but when hearing specifics really hit home how bad it is. Atrocious.
- moo 11y ago
  Chang In-suk [1], head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association in Seoul at the time, says Lee Soon-ok is a liar. The Guardian tackles the question, "Why do North Korean defector testimonies so often fall apart?" [2] [1] http://uskoreainstitute.org/research/visiting-scholars/past-visiting-scholars/suk-in-chang/ http://uskoreainstitute.org/research/visiting-scholars/past-... [2]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-korean-defector-testimonies-so-often-fall-apart http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-ko...
  - facetube 11y ago
    Interesting. Do you have any information on what was suspected to be exaggerated? I read up a bit on Chang In-suk, and saw the Guardian's reference to forum posters on NKnet (who doubted she was imprisoned), but couldn't find any of the original posts or supporting evidence. This sort of stuff would be really really bad to fabricate IMO, considering the scale of known-true suffering going on in North Korea.
yongjik 11y ago
Erm, "Mutually Assured Destruction" sort of requires the destruction to be assured mutually, by definition. There's no way they can destroy America. In the most lucky(??) case, they might be able to destroy a city or two before getting wiped out. I doubt they could destroy even South Korea. (Sure, they can kill millions, but South Korea is kinda democratic enough to survive that, and you can bet my ass that the North Korean regime will be wiped out.)
- dogma1138 11y ago
  South Korea is pretty much Seoul and NK can flatten (in theory) it with unguided rockets, Seoul is 30 or so miles of the border this is within range of even some field howitzers with RAP shells.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
Hm. Wouldn't have expected NK internet propagandists to be paying attention to Hacker News.

jayzalowitz 11y ago

The 5.1 earthquake for this bomb would suggest a smaller explosion than the bombs at the tail end of WW2, however that depends on a lot of things. Looking at this list it would suggest about a ~600 ton explosion http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/richter_magnitude_scale http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/richter_magnitude_scale

caf 11y ago
The kiloton-to-richter-scale conversion for a weapons test is highly dependent on the geology and configuration of the test site.
aidenn0 11y ago
Counterpoint: wikipedia shows a formula that puts it at 44kT[1]. However there is a note that it can vary greatly depending on the fraction of energy that is converted to seismic waves (this formula assumes 0.5%); That being said, 44kT is still way below what one would expect for a fusion bomb, and low even for a boosted fission bomb. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale#Nuclear_explosions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale#Nuclear...
- DrScump 11y ago
  44KT is basically 3 Hiroshimas.
- beedogs 11y ago
  Here's what 44KT would do to downtown San Francisco: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=44&lat=37.7564509&lng=-122.4245517&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&zm=13 http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=44&lat=37.7564509&lng...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - kitd 11y ago
    Cool site! I selected London, England and it immediately centered the blast on the Houses of Parliament. How sentient is that!

profmonocle 11y ago

Is there any reason to believe they actually tested an H Bomb? Wouldn't that be a pretty big leap from low-yield atom bombs? It seems like the only evidence it was thermonuclear is that the North Korean government said so, and they're not exactly reliable. Meanwhile, CNN is proclaiming "N. KOREA TESTS H-BOMB" on their front page, which is a pretty far cry from them claiming to have tested one.

huac 11y ago
people are saying it's likely that it was a boosted bomb instead (deadly but far far cry from a proper h-bomb) and cnn is as usual profiting off FUD
wozniacki 11y ago
Listen to the audio of the event: http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265 http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265 http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/ http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/
- kordless 11y ago
  Yeah, that sounds like a bomb going off.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  For comparison, here is the link to the recent quake off the BC coast. You don't need to be an expert to realize the differences between a bomb and a natural quake. Natural: http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5169662 http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5169662 Bomb: http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265 http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265
- trymas 11y ago
  indeed, this north korean 'seismic event' is different than other 'normal' seismic events, with exponential dampening. but is it still a proof of h-bomb? maybe just ordinary (if you could call it so) nuclear bomb test?
11y ago

horsecaptin 11y ago

Wouldn't this cause some kind of an earthquake that's detectable?

ghrifter 11y ago
It has been detected as a 5.1 http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/05/asia/north-korea-seismic-event/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/05/asia/north-korea-seismic-event...
yk 11y ago
Yes, USGS has detected it. The question is whether it was a nuke or conventional explosive or something else. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us10004bnm#general_summary http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us10004bnm#...
biot 11y ago
It might even cause a news organization to write the first two sentences of its article about that.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

atomic_nuclear 11y ago

Surely the first hydrogen bomb was constructed in 1952, not 1958?

caf 11y ago
Yes, Ivy Mike was in 1952.
- allep 11y ago
  depends on the definition of bomb: Ivy Mike was not a weapon, was a nuclear device, as big as a building
  - arethuza 11y ago
    The Ivy Mike "Sausage" was big but it didn't fill the entire building - there was a lot of instrumentation for that test. There was actually a weaponized version of the Ivy Mike Sausage planned which was cancelled when they found out how to make "dry" bombs using lithium deuteride. You can see the Sausage in the pics on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike
    - allep 11y ago
      that's the point, was not a weaponized device, does not mean it did not go boom.

exaltedbaking 11y ago

Any time discussion of the DPRK comes up, I inevitably see many people repeating blatant lies about the country. http://anti-imperialism.com/2014/08/14/western-dprk-propaganda-the-worst-occasionally-hilarious-and-often-racist-lies/ http://anti-imperialism.com/2014/08/14/western-dprk-propagan...

jqm 11y ago
There is plenty of propaganda, sure. However that doesn't mean NK isn't a state dangerous to the world in which you and I live.

scottyates11 11y ago

Every time when North Korea wants to bargain for something, it tests a bomb. Nuclear crisis is the only chip for the DPRK to survive in between the US, Russia and China.

thaumasiotes 11y ago
I was under the impression that the whole reason North Korea existed at all was because China wanted it to be there?
- WalterSear 11y ago
  As I understand itg North Korea is there because China doesn't want to have to deal with what will happen when North Korea collapses.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    I thought the point of North Korea was as a buffer zone so China wouldn't have to share a border with a potentially hostile country like US-friendly South Korea. That may be obsolete, but I'm pretty sure that was the reasoning of the time.
    - simonh 11y ago
      The reasoning of the time was that China was trying to help North Korea conquer South Korea completely. Remember the Korean war was during Mao Zedong's rule of China and he was fully committed to a global Communist revolution. Where others might see a buffer, he would see a staging area for further revolution. By the the time of Deng, North Korea was well established and successive Chinese leaders have simply tried to maintain the status quo.

csense 11y ago

What happens if the rest of the world decides to strike first with e.g. a massive wave of conventional missiles and bombers, combined with a ton of defensive mines air-dropped into the DMZ? Would it be enough to take out North Korea's nuclear capability and cripple troop encampments on the DMZ enough that they can't immediately launch a massive counterattack on South Korea?

maxlybbert 11y ago
I think the road to destabilization would be for the US to give nuclear weapons to South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, and then tell China to deal with it.
- yongjik 11y ago
  "Hey friends, because I trust you guys, I prepared this special gift. I hope you guys like it." "Oooo a present! What is it?" "It's a T-shirt with a giant logo reading "FUCK YOU CHINA", with a red bullseye painted on the back. Like it?"
- evanb 11y ago
  South Korea and Japan are already under our nuclear umbrella. It would be a major change in our nonproliferation stance to give weapons out.
  - maxlybbert 11y ago
    That's the point. I don't want destabilization. But if that's your goal, you can get it pretty quickly without any need for a sneak attack by conventional forces.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Well accept them into NATO and you can give out nukes like candy under the strategic arms sharing clause.
- bzbarsky 11y ago
  Getting Japan to accept them might run into some internal political issues; there's historically been some opposition to nuclear weapons in Japan. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Non-Nuclear_Principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Non-Nuclear_Principles for example. That said, if Japan decided it _wanted_ nuclear weapons, it can almost certainly produce them itself very quickly (order of 6-12 months according to most estimates I've seen). They have the raw fissile material due to their longstanding nuclear power plant program, and the general knowhow and infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_program#De_facto_nuclear_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_progra... has some more data.

sandworm101 11y ago

My money: a boosted device. A fission weapon with a drop of liquid hydrogen thrown in to qualify it as "thermonuclear". It had to be an h-bomb. The korean people have been told that the regime already has nuclear weapons. So any test has to be a marked improvement. The only way up from nuclear is thermonuclear. Whether that H contributed anything meaningful to the force of the blast is very much secondary (pun intended).

venomsnake 11y ago
> The only way up from nuclear is thermonuclear. Antimatter. Thankfully we have no idea how to make them yet.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  That isn't too far in the future. Using antimatter as a neutron source to prime a fission device is not total fantasy. With sufficient resources it could probably be done today on the bench (ie not a weapon). Such technology would allow for possibly very much smaller and/or more efficient fission weapons.
  - randallsquared 11y ago
    Antimatter annihilation produces gamma, not neutrons. Priming a pure fusion device seems far more likely.

sandworm101 11y ago

What is the significance of the depth being reported as 10km? Is that some sort of minimum for a quake, or did they dig down 10,000m to fire this thing off? That seems rather deep even for a large bomb, which this wasn't.

mikeyouse 11y ago
Initial reports had it at 10km deep -- which would've been far too deep for a bomb test -- they've since been revised to 0km deep, which is what you'd expect for a test beneath the surface. The 10km was interesting since if it held up, it would have likely ruled out a test, but it turns out that the first readings were wrong.

njharman 11y ago

George Carlin explained this here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMwXR-1oajE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMwXR-1oajE

kordless 11y ago
The NK bombs carry the -dong suffix on them, so yeah, he was bang on.
graycat 11y ago
Carlin neglected to make use of the Bush 41 statement "this will not stand" -- how could Carlin miss that opportunity!
- pluma 11y ago
  When did we stop calling him Junior? There's not even a new actual presidential candidate with the name. Calling him "Bush 41" makes him sound more like a nu metal band than a former president.
  - tjakab 11y ago
    Bush 41 is George H. W. Bush. Junior is Bush 43.
    - J_Darnley 11y ago
      Too many fullstops to correctly parse that sentence. Or is it two? (This is why I like double spaces.)
    - pluma 11y ago
      Senior then. I guess my comment serves as evidence for why the numbering is useless for anyone not paying close attention to the sequence of US presidents.

lenkite 11y ago

If as a nation, you wish to be safe from US invasion/arm-twisting, you must have nuclear weapons. It is the best possible deterrent against US interference. Countries that do not have nuclear weapons must depend on US benevolence - which tends to change from year to year depending on the policies being followed by the US state department and administration. If Saddam really had nuclear weapons, there would have been no Iraq war and no ISIS today.

GordonS 11y ago
On the 'arm-twisting' side, the UK has nuclear weapons but are regularly treated as a US 'bitch'. Nuclear weapons are far from the only thing that can be used as leverage. Totally agree with you about the Iraq war and ISIS though.
- bobwaycott 11y ago
  Perhaps arm-twisting is more effective when the power doing the twisting is known to have used nuclear weapons.
  - GordonS 11y ago
    ...Except, in this case the power having the arm twisted also has nuclear weapons.

efremjw 11y ago

The myth of nuclear deterrence is an interesting concept http://setbpbx.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/policy/PDFs/153_wilson[1].pdf http://setbpbx.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weap...

simonh 11y ago
I don't find the linked document at all convincing. To qualify as 'City Attacks' we would expect that those bombs would have been dropped on the largest population centres available as targets. In fact they were dropped not on the most populous cities, or on the most populous parts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but actually they were dropped on the port and navy facilities at Hroshima and the arms manufacturing facilities in Nagasaki. In fact the second bomb was originally intended to be dropped on the arsenal at Kokura and was switched to Nagasaki due to bad weather. yes they are cities, but they were prioritised on military grounds. For civilians, we generally think and worry about bombs targeting cities, but most nuclear weapons are actually aimed at military targets. The primary targets are the enemy's own nuclear weapons, military assets and infrastructure come second and population centres last of all. The point of nuclear deference isn't that if we have a war mum and dad will be killed, it's that everyone will be killed. The fact is we have vast amounts of direct testimony from US and Russian military personnel and leaders, both at the time and in subsequent interviews books and testimony, that deterrence was the primary consideration in their defensive and offensive planning.
- iSnow 11y ago
  >The primary targets are the enemy's own nuclear weapons, military assets and infrastructure come second and population centres last of all. Humbug: "“The authors developed a plan for the ‘systematic destruction’ of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted ‘population’ in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin and Warsaw,” Burr pointed out. “Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se (as opposed to military installations with civilians nearby).” But other contemporary sources make it abundantly clear the Pentagon saw any person tied to a war effort as a viable military target. A now declassified 1952 U.S. Navy film on chemical and biological warfare specifically states a goal “to incapacitate the enemy’s armed forces and that portion of his human population that directly supports them.” With similar thoughts in mind, the U.S. Army had looked into radiological warfare and built deadly dirty bombs." (http://warisboring.com/articles/this-cold-war-study-is-a-catalog-of-nuclear-death/ http://warisboring.com/articles/this-cold-war-study-is-a-cat...) Civilians have always been targets and always will be.

arethuza 11y ago

Perhaps worth noting that North Korea wouldn't be the first country to bluff that they had exploded an H-bomb when they hadn't - the UK did this with some tests in the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapple

stevefolta 11y ago
The Soviets did it too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_4
- arethuza 11y ago
  I think you could argue that the Joe 4 design was an attempt to design a H-bomb using a different approach that turned out to be a dead end - the US was aware of this design but never tested it. Whereas the UK just plain lied and continues to be evasive about the matter to this day - probably because the exercise was mostly aimed at the US.
  - m-i-l 11y ago
    The Grapple X on 8 November 1957 (a few months after the Grapple 1 on 15 May 1957) was a successful thermonuclear device[0], so it was only a short term bluff. Bear in mind that this was in the context of the British feeling betrayed by the Americans on nuclear research - from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Energy_Act_of_1946 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Energy_Act_of_1946 : "Implementing the McMahon Act created a substantial rift between United States and Britain. The new control of 'restricted data' prevented the United States' allies from receiving any information, despite the fact that the British and Canadian governments, before contributing technology and manpower to the Manhattan Project, had made agreements with the United States about the post-war sharing of nuclear technology. Those agreements had been formalized in the 1943 Quebec Agreement. In the case of the United Kingdom, these were developed further in the 1944 Hyde Park Agreement, which was signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapple#Grapple_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapple#Grapple_X

jensen123 11y ago

I wonder if this would have happened if the US hadn't been meddling so much? For example Bush's "Axis of Evil".

nitrogen 11y ago
After watching documentaries about North Korea with smuggled film, it would surprise me if the country could have turned out much different than it is now.

Tharkun 11y ago

Maybe they should focus their efforts on getting their food production going so their people don't starve to death. Just sayin'...

zanny 11y ago
You don't run a totalitarian regime in the interests of your people. Its profitable to be a kingpin in the NK chain of command. Its what the dick waving of nuclear arms is - look, we have a bomb, give us more free shit. And it isn't even the threat of war. Its a threat of jumping the shark so they have to be conquered, leaving the region with 25 million destitute refugees to somehow deal with. Just for comparison, the EU is having huge trouble dealing with 11 million Syrian refugees and only 4 million have fled the country.

theworstshill 11y ago

Imagine a world where every country has nuclear weapons and methods of their delivery - a true democracy, or a diversity of democracies you could say.