North Korean Fusion

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

Moderators: tonybarry, MSimon

Skipjack
Posts: 6805
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 2:29 pm

Post by Skipjack »

gave indications of less than 1 KTon for first test and a couple of KTon for second test
Well piling up two thousand tons of TNT and exploding them all at once is not that easy either. So I would assume that they built at least a low yield nuclear explosive device. Of course nobody really knows what the NKs have or dont have. If they dont have any nuclear bombs though, why is everybody freaking out about them.

Helius
Posts: 465
Joined: Sun Oct 21, 2007 9:48 pm
Location: Syracuse, New York

Sorry, no Tritium today.

Post by Helius »

I thought the low yield was because they didn't bother to load the Tritium.

Building and exploding the Pt core is the hard part and hey proved out that part. Why load the booster and destroy a perfectly good mountain?

Giorgio
Posts: 3061
Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2009 6:15 pm
Location: China, Italy

Re: Sorry, no Tritium today.

Post by Giorgio »

Helius wrote:I thought the low yield was because they didn't bother to load the Tritium.

Building and exploding the Pt core is the hard part and hey proved out that part. Why load the booster and destroy a perfectly good mountain?
You are thinking that they was testing a thermonuclear bomb which IMHO is an order of magnitude more complex to build than a standad fission device.

Giorgio
Posts: 3061
Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2009 6:15 pm
Location: China, Italy

Post by Giorgio »

Skipjack wrote:
gave indications of less than 1 KTon for first test and a couple of KTon for second test
Well piling up two thousand tons of TNT and exploding them all at once is not that easy either. So I would assume that they built at least a low yield nuclear explosive device. Of course nobody really knows what the NKs have or dont have. If they dont have any nuclear bombs though, why is everybody freaking out about them.
I agree that exploding with a correct timing the whole 2K tons is not an easy task, but I wonder how much more easy it is to do that in respect of actually buillding a fission device.

As on why everyone is freaking at them, that's a good question, even if I am still trying to understand why everyone was freaking out at Saddam Hussein....

bcglorf
Posts: 436
Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2007 2:58 pm

Really?

Post by bcglorf »

Giorgio wrote:
Skipjack wrote:
gave indications of less than 1 KTon for first test and a couple of KTon for second test
Well piling up two thousand tons of TNT and exploding them all at once is not that easy either. So I would assume that they built at least a low yield nuclear explosive device. Of course nobody really knows what the NKs have or dont have. If they dont have any nuclear bombs though, why is everybody freaking out about them.
I agree that exploding with a correct timing the whole 2K tons is not an easy task, but I wonder how much more easy it is to do that in respect of actually buillding a fission device.

As on why everyone is freaking at them, that's a good question, even if I am still trying to understand why everyone was freaking out at Saddam Hussein....
I can't figure out why everyone WASN'T freaking out at Saddam much, much sooner.
1.Genocide of better than a quarter million of his own people.
2.The use chemical weapons both to commit genocide, and wage war on his neighbor.
3.Harboring, protecting and employing terrorists.
4.Annexing another sovereign UN member state.
5.Pursuit and development of a nuclear weapons program at least up until Israel bombed it.

Saddam was one of the absolute worst and most violent tyrants our world had seen since Hitler and Stalin.

Skipjack
Posts: 6805
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 2:29 pm

Post by Skipjack »

Pol Pot, Suslov, Khomeini...
Lets not forget about those...

Giorgio
Posts: 3061
Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2009 6:15 pm
Location: China, Italy

Re: Really?

Post by Giorgio »

bcglorf wrote:
Giorgio wrote:
Skipjack wrote: Well piling up two thousand tons of TNT and exploding them all at once is not that easy either. So I would assume that they built at least a low yield nuclear explosive device. Of course nobody really knows what the NKs have or dont have. If they dont have any nuclear bombs though, why is everybody freaking out about them.
I agree that exploding with a correct timing the whole 2K tons is not an easy task, but I wonder how much more easy it is to do that in respect of actually buillding a fission device.

As on why everyone is freaking at them, that's a good question, even if I am still trying to understand why everyone was freaking out at Saddam Hussein....
I can't figure out why everyone WASN'T freaking out at Saddam much, much sooner.
1.Genocide of better than a quarter million of his own people.
2.The use chemical weapons both to commit genocide, and wage war on his neighbor.
3.Harboring, protecting and employing terrorists.
4.Annexing another sovereign UN member state.
5.Pursuit and development of a nuclear weapons program at least up until Israel bombed it.

Saddam was one of the absolute worst and most violent tyrants our world had seen since Hitler and Stalin.
You missed my logic.
I am not stating that he should not have been overthrown, I am stating that everyone was screaming that he had nukes and an incredible arsenal of mass destruction weapons, while in effect he was simply a crazy guy bluffing about those weapons.
And if he did not have these weapons with all the billions that oil sales was bringing to him, how could it be possible for a nation like NK with no cash at all to have them?


We all live better lifes with Saddam Hussein off this world and I will not cry if Kim Jong Il will join him, but we are not discussing politics here, we are discussing about possibility that NK has fission weapons or not.

Helius
Posts: 465
Joined: Sun Oct 21, 2007 9:48 pm
Location: Syracuse, New York

Re: Sorry, no Tritium today.

Post by Helius »

Giorgio wrote:
Helius wrote:I thought the low yield was because they didn't bother to load the Tritium.

Building and exploding the Pt core is the hard part and hey proved out that part. Why load the booster and destroy a perfectly good mountain?
You are thinking that they was testing a thermonuclear bomb which IMHO is an order of magnitude more complex to build than a standad fission device.
No. A tritium boosted fission bomb isn't much added complexity to a well designed Plutonium core. I believe no-one would bother designing a weapon without some neutrons generated from fusion to enhance the weapon's power to weight ratio. We're still talking technology much less advanced than the Teller-Elam Weapon or the Sakarov version of it.

KitemanSA
Posts: 6179
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 3:05 pm
Location: OlyPen WA

Post by KitemanSA »

Skipjack wrote: Well piling up two thousand tons of TNT and exploding them all at once is not that easy either. So I would assume that they built at least a low yield nuclear explosive device. Of course nobody really knows what the NKs have or dont have. If they dont have any nuclear bombs though, why is everybody freaking out about them.
Given a reasonable size hole in the ground, creating a 2kton explosion is fairly easy. First, fill with Ammonium Nitrate (how much "fertelizer" didn't make it to the fields?). Second, put in ~7000 barrels of diesel. Third, drop in a stick (ok, maybe a brace of sticks) of TNT with a blasting cap. Fourth, push the plunger and AWAYYY you go!

Giorgio
Posts: 3061
Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2009 6:15 pm
Location: China, Italy

Post by Giorgio »

One of the few industrial complex in North Korea is a 900.000 Tons Nitrogen fertilizer complex.

Should be this one:
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=39.6 ... 6&t=h&z=16

bcglorf
Posts: 436
Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2007 2:58 pm

Re: Really?

Post by bcglorf »

Giorgio wrote:
bcglorf wrote:
Giorgio wrote: I agree that exploding with a correct timing the whole 2K tons is not an easy task, but I wonder how much more easy it is to do that in respect of actually buillding a fission device.

As on why everyone is freaking at them, that's a good question, even if I am still trying to understand why everyone was freaking out at Saddam Hussein....
I can't figure out why everyone WASN'T freaking out at Saddam much, much sooner.
1.Genocide of better than a quarter million of his own people.
2.The use chemical weapons both to commit genocide, and wage war on his neighbor.
3.Harboring, protecting and employing terrorists.
4.Annexing another sovereign UN member state.
5.Pursuit and development of a nuclear weapons program at least up until Israel bombed it.

Saddam was one of the absolute worst and most violent tyrants our world had seen since Hitler and Stalin.
You missed my logic.
I am not stating that he should not have been overthrown, I am stating that everyone was screaming that he had nukes and an incredible arsenal of mass destruction weapons, while in effect he was simply a crazy guy bluffing about those weapons.
And if he did not have these weapons with all the billions that oil sales was bringing to him, how could it be possible for a nation like NK with no cash at all to have them?


We all live better lifes with Saddam Hussein off this world and I will not cry if Kim Jong Il will join him, but we are not discussing politics here, we are discussing about possibility that NK has fission weapons or not.
Without the first Gulf War and Israel's bombing of the reactor Saddam got from France, Saddam would have had nuclear weapons by 2003. North Korea easily has the capacity to develop fission weapons. Being able to simply pass on feeding your population makes some room in the budget. I don't think there can be much question that North Korea has the resources needed, and they certainly have had the will to man their military at the cost of absolutely everything else, save the secret police.

Tom Ligon
Posts: 1871
Joined: Wed Aug 22, 2007 1:23 am
Location: Northern Virginia
Contact:

Post by Tom Ligon »

If some upstart third world country simply claimed to have nuclear weapons out of the blue, I would suspect a bluff. If they made a big underground rumble and I saw no evidence of a nuclear operation and every evidence of fuel oil and fertilizer, I might dismiss it as saber-rattling.

But if I had clear evidence (say, for example, they had allowed inspectors on-site for a while at a plutonium-production reactor) that they actually had the capacity to crank out plutonium, and furthermore knew that they valued the lives of their people so little that they wouldn't mind having people handle plutonium with minimal equipment, I would not doubt for a minute that they could at least build a "gun-type" fission explosive. The jump from some tens of kg of plutonium to a bomb is a high-school-science no-brainer. They might not be refined enough to make a particularly efficient one, but they ought to be able to match the Hiroshima weapon.

Now let's say that country has a certifiably-nuts and very belligerent leader who does things like building and launching missiles capable of reaching a quarter the way around the globe, who torpedos a ship of a neighboring country, and who threatens war several times a week, I would ... ah ... be concerned.

D Tibbets
Posts: 2775
Joined: Thu Jun 26, 2008 6:52 am

Re: Really?

Post by D Tibbets »

Giorgio wrote:
bcglorf wrote:
Giorgio wrote: I agree that exploding with a correct timing the whole 2K tons is not an easy task, but I wonder how much more easy it is to do that in respect of actually buillding a fission device.

As on why everyone is freaking at them, that's a good question, even if I am still trying to understand why everyone was freaking out at Saddam Hussein....
I can't figure out why everyone WASN'T freaking out at Saddam much, much sooner.
1.Genocide of better than a quarter million of his own people.
2.The use chemical weapons both to commit genocide, and wage war on his neighbor.
3.Harboring, protecting and employing terrorists.
4.Annexing another sovereign UN member state.
5.Pursuit and development of a nuclear weapons program at least up until Israel bombed it.

Saddam was one of the absolute worst and most violent tyrants our world had seen since Hitler and Stalin.
You missed my logic.
I am not stating that he should not have been overthrown, I am stating that everyone was screaming that he had nukes and an incredible arsenal of mass destruction weapons, while in effect he was simply a crazy guy bluffing about those weapons.
And if he did not have these weapons with all the billions that oil sales was bringing to him, how could it be possible for a nation like NK with no cash at all to have them?


We all live better lifes with Saddam Hussein off this world and I will not cry if Kim Jong Il will join him, but we are not discussing politics here, we are discussing about possibility that NK has fission weapons or not.

I don't know how difficult it is to blow up a pile of TNT, so long as you are not concerned about close symetrical tolorances that are needed for an implosion nuclear device.

From my limited understanding , the first NK test was probably an atom bomb that fizzled. If there is too much Pu240 (comes from having the fuel rods in the reactor too long) in your bomb, it fissions too fast and the bomb blows itself apart before a desired amount of the fissle material can fission. Perhaps only 0.5-1% of the Pu fissioned, as opposed to 30-40% in a 'good' bomb and perhaps 60-80% in advanced bombs(?). This is called a fizzle, I beleive. Less than optimal implosion might also have been a factor. With this you would only blow up a small city, instead of a large city. Still plenty of fall out though.

As far as NK being able to build a bomb, most of the work was done through an imported nuclear reactor. All they had to do was extract the Plutonium and work on the explosives. And again, imported materials and devices (fast switches) may have been aviable.

Dan Tibbets
To error is human... and I'm very human.

Giorgio
Posts: 3061
Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2009 6:15 pm
Location: China, Italy

Post by Giorgio »

@Tom Ligon

Evidence is exactly what we are lacking in this case. Starting from the lack of any radiation after both tests (but we can find an explanations also for this if we want).
Than if we decide as humanity to go there and remove a psycho leader I can agree, but let do it for this reason, not because we are scared.




@ D Tibbets

I Agree with you and I also believe that they have conducted a nuclear test trying to fission nuclear material without decent results.

What I am sceptic about is for them to have a Nuclear device, meaning a nuclear Bomb that can be installed into (and launched with) a rocket.

pfrit
Posts: 256
Joined: Thu Aug 28, 2008 5:04 pm

Post by pfrit »

Building a fussion bomb really is not that tricky. The hard part is making one that you can deliver to target that will explode reliably. That is very much harder. I am inclined to beleive that NK cannot do this at this point. They would need to have tested a design to be able to deploy it. They haven't had a really succesful test and they have a very limited amount of fissile material to play with.
What is the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don't know and I don't care.

Post Reply