60 years ago it took several years from fission to fusion bomb. H-bomb is simple once you got the fission one. NK got their first fission several years ago. So it is about time.<p>It is frequently suggested that NK explosions are [half]failures because of low yields. Well, making low yield fission or fusion bomb is actually much harder then a powerful one and historically the pinnacle of nukes have been the low yield "neutron" ones. The low yield ones are also much more scarier as a weapon because they require lower threshold of craziness to use - i.e. sending a 1MT ballistic missile on a city even Kim III may be not ready to order while 0.5KT is just like that Chinese port explosion several month ago.<p>Anyway, giving the amount of tech assistance NK got in 199x from former Soviet researchers, one can only blame NK economy on why it has been taking them so long to join the club.
Last time North Korea did nuclear test, Comprehensive Nulcear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization(CTBTO)'s radionuclide monitoring station at Takasaki, Japan successfully detected Xenon. So let's wait for CTBTO.<p><a href="http://www.mofa.go.jp/press/release/press3e_000001.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.mofa.go.jp/press/release/press3e_000001.html</a><p>By the way, CTBTO has a website: <a href="https://www.ctbto.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ctbto.org/</a>
Apparently their last test was also detected at magnitude 5.1, so I suppose that this was probably not an H-bomb.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_and_weapons_of_mas.." rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_and_weapons_of_mas...</a>.<p>>On February 11, 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey detected a magnitude 5.1 seismic disturbance,[13] reported to be a third underground nuclear test.[14] North Korea has officially reported it as a successful nuclear test with a lighter warhead that delivers more force than before, but has not revealed the exact yield. Multiple South Korean sources estimate the yield at 6–9 kilotons, while the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources estimates the yield at 40 kilotons.[15][16][17]
If that was a hydrogen bomb test, it sounds an awful lot like the trigger did not achieve the intended criticality with respect to the fusion component. This would not be surprising in that their prior fission tests also had dubious yields.
In arguments over the relative safeness of the world it is often pointed out that relatively few people have died recently in terrorist attacks, but as N. N. Taleb points out, the distribution of deaths by terrorist attacks is a fat tailed one: the current average does not preclude much higher future numbers. Such devices as this in the hands of such actors as NK give us more concrete feelings for the real risks involved. More focus needs to be paid to these sorts of risks, we will be lucky to live out our lives without a major nuclear terrorism event.
You can see it in wolframalpha
<a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=earthquakes+in+north+korea" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=earthquakes+in+north+ko...</a>
We are never ever going to free those poor people in North Korea.<p>Such horrible lives.<p>China should be ashamed for perpetuating this.<p>Was hoping to see within my lifetime a re-unification like Germany but that's basically never going to happen.<p>Unless they find oil in Korea, unlike Iran we are never going to give a damn, politically, morally or otherwise.
This seems incredibly unlikely. Anyone with a good machine shop and some fissile material can build a fission bomb in their garage (ok, it's not <i>that</i> easy). But fusion bombs are another beast altogether.<p>Fusion bombs work by setting off a fission primary stage inside a closed container, which ignites fusion in a deuterium secondary stage. But the devil is in the details. The energy from the primary (in the form of either neutrons, heat, or X-rays; which one it is is highly classified) needs to be focused through an interstage (the details of which are, again, classified) into some sort of styrofoam (really) medium which turns into plasma. This somehow starts fusing the deuterium inside it, which involves the use of a fissile "spark plug" to produce more neutrons. And deuterium isn't that easy to come by. The whole process is so tricky that the British couldn't get it to work for a long time after the Americans gave them plans.<p>So, yeah, I don't believe it.