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By John Power
A look at the evidence nuclear weapons experts used to analyze North Korea’s nuclear test.
Despite its bluster, it appears all but certain that North Korea didn’t successfully denote its first hydrogen bomb on Wednesday as claimed. Within minutes of Pyongyang’s big announcement via state media, nuclear weapons experts were lining up to pour doubt on the bluster.
But why are they so confident?
While a definitive answer could lie in the analysis of radiation levels, which is yet to run its course, all signs are that whatever exploded at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site at 10 am local time on January 6 was a smaller, less sophisticated device.
The key clue is seismic activity recorded after the blast. H-bombs, which are based on nuclear fusion rather than fission, can be thousands of times more powerful than the atomic weapon that flattened Hiroshima. The quake caused by Wednesday’s blast, measuring 4.85 on the Richter scale, points to a much less powerful weapon. From the estimates produced so far, Pyongyang’s fourth nuclear detention appears to have had less than half the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Japan.
Read the full story at The Diplomat