North Korea Nuke?

[Rob Lister]

I call this one B.S.

snip:

A defector claiming to have been in the North Korean parliament said the communist state has produced a nuclear bomb and attempted to sell missiles to Taiwan, a South Korean magazine reported.

South Korean intelligence authorities declined to comment on the report in the Monthly Chosun, which said that the defector, a man believed to be in his 70s using the alias Kim Il-Do, defected to the South in May.

"North Korea has built a one-tonne nuclear bomb by using four kilogrammes of plutonium," he was quoted as telling the National Intelligence Service (NIS), South Korea's spy agency.

The North was now seeking to miniaturize the bomb to make it more reliable as a weapon, he reportedly said. The man claimed he had been in the North's parliament and had worked for the Marine Industrial Institute.

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/050720/1/3tm49.html

Forgetting the poor (very poor) reporting and lack of detail, this is bunk. I know (or am given to believe) NK is working on a bomb but this doesn't do much to convince me that they have one yet. For example, suppose part of what is reported is accurate: One ton weapon (assume actual weight not yeild) that they want to miniaturize to make more reliable. That doesn't add up because they have yet to test (and I put a good degree of faith in our ability to know) the reliablility of the design in the first place. If they had one that they were confident would go off, they'd build two more just like it and test two of the three; testing one, waiting for the western outcries, then testing the other shortly thereafter.

Make me a liar. Make me wrong. Fault my logic.

This don't add up.

 

[Chaos]

Four kilograms of plutonium? I´m not a nuclear physics guy, but I clearly recall reading that the critical mass for plutonium is five kilograms.

 

[Luke T.]

Four kilograms of plutonium? I´m not a nuclear physics guy, but I clearly recall reading that the critical mass for plutonium is five kilograms.

A plutonium bomb with less than critical mass can be overcome with an implosion that compresses the plutonium to a high density.

 

[Kerberos]

Four kilograms of plutonium? I´m not a nuclear physics guy, but I clearly recall reading that the critical mass for plutonium is five kilograms.

10 kg actually:
"The isotope Plutonium-239 is a key fissile component in modern nuclear weapons, due to its ease of fissioning and availability. The critical mass for an unreflected sphere of plutonium is 16 kg, but through the use of a neutron reflecting tamper the pit of plutonium in a fission bomb is reduced to 10 kg, which is a sphere with a diameter of 10 cm. Complete detonation of plutonium will produce an explosion of 20 kilotons per kilogram. (See also Nuclear Weapon Design.)"Wikipedia

 

[Luke T.]

And the critical mass for plutonium is well above 4 or 5 kilos.

 

[Ed]

And the critical mass for plutonium is well above 4 or 5 kilos.

This is beginning to sound like a peace loving Islamic chat group

 

[Luke T.]

Ah. Kerberos beat me to it.

Using the implosion method, 4 kilos will work for an atomic bomb, though.

 

[Luke T.]

This is beginning to sound like a peace loving Islamic chat group

There cannot be peace on Earth until every infidel is dead. Allah Akbar!

 

[Rob Lister]

I don't know the physics. The reporting can't be trusted insofar as the science goes. But the politics of the matter are far more clear. They don't have one . . . or more accurately, they don't have three weapons and one proven design. There's only one way to test a design if combined with a new process, and that's to test it. They haven't done so* and therefore they don't have one.


*assumes facts I assume would be in evidence. The double assumption is not too risky in this case.