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| China-Japan-Koreas | |
| Russia: NKorea test greater than reported | |
| 2006-10-09 | |
MOSCOW - Russia‘s defense minister said Monday that North Korea‘s nuclear test was equivalent to 5,000 tons to 15,000 tons of TNT. That would be far greater than the force given by South Korea‘s geological institute, which estimated it at just 550 tons of TNT.
The U.S. Geological Survey U.S. Geological Survey said it recorded a magnitude-4.2 seismic event in northeastern North Korea. Asian neighbors also said they registered a seismic event, but only Russia said its monitoring services had detected a nuclear explosion. "We know the exact site of the test. The ecological situation is normal, including on Russian territory in Primorye," Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said, referring to the Russian Far East province that shares a short border with North Korea. | |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #8 A "fake" "nuclear" detonation > implies that starving NORTH KOREA may truly want to break from China's control but is aware of the sensitivities of the Chicommies towards having a potens future reunified KOREAS NOT under either COMMUNISM OR CHINESE CONTROL. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2006-10-09 23:45 |
| #7 CNN > Senior US INTEL Official > US INTEL can't affirm whether [first]test was a de facto nuke test. Official claims may had been a "SUB-KILOTON" NON-NUCLEAR event producable by using many many tons of TNT = HE's. *IOW, A POSSIBLE "FAKE" NUKE TEST. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2006-10-09 23:40 |
| #6 You can be sure that if we didn't have a detector platform in South Korea already,we flew one in for the event. I'd also wager a bundle that we used our terrain mapping satellites to do a ground penetrating scan of the intervening territory in order to improve our estimates of the yield. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2006-10-09 21:21 |
| #5 When they did the Cannikan shots at Amchitka in 1971, I was working for USGS in earthquake research in Menlo Park, CA. We watched the 5 megaton shot coming in on the seismographs. Quite lively on the charts. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2006-10-09 17:17 |
| #4 The Russians likely have a good idea of the geology of the area - all important for yield estimation. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2006-10-09 11:51 |
| #3 The USGS signal processing is oriented towards earthquakes. I suspect we have quite detailed seismic data on the explosion and know exactly how big it was. Doesn't mean we want to talk about it though. A lot of the seismometer data is freely available. No doubt, numerically oriented geeks will have a field day with it. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2006-10-09 10:53 |
| #2 Surely we have others with detectors besides the USGS, the kind of detectores sensitive to this kind of thing? If the seismic wave went through the Earth several times, well we're on the other side of that, right? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-10-09 10:39 |
| #1 great |
| Posted by: bk 2006-10-09 09:45 |