Comment Re:It's a lie by Kim Jong Illin' (Score 1) 1623
I remain unconvinced that it's a real nuke.
The russians said it was... they also said 300k people died in Dresden. The real figure was 30k.
The whitehouse said it was a nuke. Same guys with the WMD in Iraq. They're facing an election and fear has worked well in the past for them.
I have not yet seen a credible scientific source say it was a nuke.
Jim Lehrer's Newshour said it was like 1/2 to 1 kiloton. The technical nerd they had on was useless and gave no sense of how lame that is. Hiroshima & Nagasaki were like 10kt to 20kt each. The biggest nukes ever tested were 20 and 50 MEGAtons. US & Russian icbms are like a megaton apiece. Tactical howitzer shells are more like 1kt to 10kt - don't want to hurt the home team on the battlefield. In the atmosphere, 1/2kt is a fireball a fraction of a mile in size.
OK so 1/2kt is either a pretty lame nuke, or else Kim managed to scrape up 500 tons of TNT and bury it and set it off.
Putting this onto a warhead is a different issue. It's got to be lightweight, unlike an underground test. And it would be nice if the missle could get farther than the other side of Japan. With some accuracy - most of the US is still rural.
It should be reliable - how many devices did Kim set off the same weekend that were duds? They don't show up on seismographs.
OK so they're far away from having a missle lob onto Seattle.
The russians said it was... they also said 300k people died in Dresden. The real figure was 30k.
The whitehouse said it was a nuke. Same guys with the WMD in Iraq. They're facing an election and fear has worked well in the past for them.
I have not yet seen a credible scientific source say it was a nuke.
Jim Lehrer's Newshour said it was like 1/2 to 1 kiloton. The technical nerd they had on was useless and gave no sense of how lame that is. Hiroshima & Nagasaki were like 10kt to 20kt each. The biggest nukes ever tested were 20 and 50 MEGAtons. US & Russian icbms are like a megaton apiece. Tactical howitzer shells are more like 1kt to 10kt - don't want to hurt the home team on the battlefield. In the atmosphere, 1/2kt is a fireball a fraction of a mile in size.
OK so 1/2kt is either a pretty lame nuke, or else Kim managed to scrape up 500 tons of TNT and bury it and set it off.
Putting this onto a warhead is a different issue. It's got to be lightweight, unlike an underground test. And it would be nice if the missle could get farther than the other side of Japan. With some accuracy - most of the US is still rural.
It should be reliable - how many devices did Kim set off the same weekend that were duds? They don't show up on seismographs.
OK so they're far away from having a missle lob onto Seattle.
