Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Junior]

China could always nuke pyonyang of course. They do have 80 operational nuclear missiles, after all.

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/china/nuke/index.html

see?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=9xoHbBkUGSQ

China's illegal test in East Turkestan.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=NGuGdyPju5I&mode=related&search=

[Manner of Speaking]

[Junior]

[The Lemon]

[Manner of Speaking]

Sorry, I'm a little jumpy.

Last Tuesday, I was a little worried about the environmental consequences of a nuclear test. This is a small country, there is not much room to safely detonate a weapon that produces fission products, even if you bury it deep underground. I couldn't help thinking what might happen if a test goes wrong...

Fission bombs work by compressing Pu239 in a symmetrical explosion using conventional explosives. It's extremely difficult to create a symmetrical shock wave resulting in a nuclear explosion, and there is a very high risk -- with poorly made nuclear weapons -- of a bomb simply exploding chemically....and spreading highly radioactive material over a wide area.

But also...even if a nuclear test is successful, if the device is not 'buried' properly, there is a risk of HIGHLY radioactive material reaching the surface and entering the atmosphere, or of the explosion itself breaching the earth's surface and generating a large volume of radioactive dust/ fallout. I am surprised, but glad, there have been no reports of abnormal levels of radiation detected anywhere. So far. A badly botched test could easily turn into another Chernobyl. And as I said, this is a small country. A fallout cloud could easily stretch from Beijing to Hokkaido.

[Junior]

In short, it is virtually impossible to conduct a safe underground test. If adequate detection systems are in place, they should be able to detect radiation within a day or 2.


http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO5.html

". The high frequency of venting of radioactive products from previous underground tests suggests that either there was no serious attempt to contain them, or that containment is difficult and uncertain."


Impacts of underground nuclear testing

All tests at the Nevada Test site in the United States following the Limited Test Ban Treaty (723 in all) were designed to completely contain the radioactivity underground. Nevertheless, about 55% of all tests led to radioactivity being released to the atmosphere. In the Soviet Union, nearly 60% of the underground nuclear tests conducted at the Novaya Zemlya test site released radioactivity into the atmosphere.

Most of these releases are typically small compared to releases from atmospheric tests and were largely localised. However, radioactive nuclides from 52 US nuclear tests were detected outside the test site (about 1300 square miles in area), often at dose rates several times the background radiation rate. Radioactivity from the 1970 Baneberry test was detected as far away as Canada.