Did North Korea Conduct Secret Nuclear Tests?

gbrumfiel writes "In May of 2010, North Korea made the bizarre claim that it had achieved nuclear fusion. Many, many commentators (including faithful Slashdot readers) mocked the dear leader for his outlandish boast, but could there have been a kernel of truth in the claim? Apparently some odd radioactivity was spotted by detectors surrounding the North just days after the announcement. Now, a new analysis by a Swedish scientist suggests that the radiation may have leaked from covert experiments into boosting fission warheads. The evidence is tentative at best, and many are skeptical, but it does seem that something odd was up on the Korean peninsula that spring."

More like...

[ackthpt]

More like they had an accident and covered it up with "We make bomb for advancement of North Korean workers and great glory of Dear Leader"

IIRC there was a very large explosion of a train car which they were pretty hushed up about, apparently Dear Leader, who only trusted rail travel, was on his train and not too terribly far from the accident when it happened.

If this country didn't exist, with all its screwy behavior, Sci-Fi writers would have a tough time making it all up.

Fusion is easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Fusion is easy. You can make fusion with a tabletop setup. Overunity is the hard part. Explosive fusion is also hard. It wouldn't surprise me if the dear leader made some bigass Farnsworth Fusors and ran them knowing that people would be monitoring. It's a cheap way to fuel this kind of speculation.

Fusion....right

[Nidi62]

That would explain why North Korea is one of the most brightly lit countries in the world. They have so much electricity available for everyone to use because they have harnessed nuclear fusion. But then, why does it look like this [newscientist.com]?

Re:Seismic evidence?

[ackthpt]

Nuclear detonations create telltale signatures on seismometers, which makes it pretty much impossible to perform nuclear tests without being noticed by the international community. The article even admits this:

Others remain deeply sceptical that the tests took place at all. Most troubling is the lack of any seismic vibrations to support the radioisotope data, according to Ola Dahlman, a retired geophysicist who spent years working with the test-ban group's detection network. The Korean peninsula is wired to spot the tiniest shake from a nuclear explosion, Dahlman says. "It should have been able to see something."

A mate of mine performed this work in the late 80's and early 1990's, at a location I'll not divulge, but suffice to say the sensitivity of their monitoring equipment was completely saturated by the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake in Northern California. They could track every little tremor around the world, including mining explosions and pinpoint the location with great accuracy. This was part of Nuclear Test Ban Treaty adherence monitoring.

Re:Easy fix.

[Dahamma]

Economically China doesn't want the competition that cheap North Korean labor combined with an already highly industrialized South Korea would bring.

Militarily if you combined the armies of North and South Korea it would be the *second* largest by active personnel behind China (clearly behind US & Russia in technology, but not by as much as you'd think as the US provides a lot of hardware). If you combine their trained (active and reserve) military personnel, it absolutely dwarfs any other military besides Russia.

That's plenty of reason for China not to want to see a unified democratic Korea...