Earthquake? Nuclear explosion? Fission or fusion? We will find out even if the world leaders lie. There are not many things on the international stage that are more frightening than the possibility of a nuclear war. Many countries have warheads - some with fission, others with more deadly fusion - but not all openly claim they have them. Some detonate nuclear devices in denial; others claim to have thermonuclear bombs when in reality they do not. With our deep knowledge of science, the Earth and how pressure waves travel through it, we don't need to torture a country's leader to find out the truth, says Ethan Siegel of Medium.com.
In January 2016, the North Korean government announced that it had detonated a hydrogen bomb, which it also promised to use against any aggressors threatening the country. Although detailed photographs of mushroom clouds were shown in news outlets, the footage turned out to be archived; the tests were not modern. Radiation entering the atmosphere is dangerous and would be a clear violation of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. So if countries want to test nuclear weapons, they do it where no one can find radiation: underground.
In South Korea, reporting on the situation was eerie, but inaccurate, as the mushroom clouds shown are old footage, not related to the North Korean test.
You can detonate a bomb anywhere: in the air, underwater in the ocean, or underground. All three explosions can in principle be detected, although the energy of the explosion will be "muted" depending on the environment in which it propagates.
Air, being the least dense, drowns out sound the worst. Thunderstorms, volcanic eruptions, rocket launches and nuclear explosions emit not only sound waves that can be heard, but also infrasonic (long wave, low frequency), which - in the event of a nuclear explosion - are so energetically powerful that detectors around the world can easily recognize.
Nuclear explosion cloud over Nagasaki
Water is denser, and although sound waves travel faster in water than in air, energy dissipates faster with distance traveled. However, if a nuclear bomb explodes underwater, the energy released is so great that the generated pressure waves can be easily detected by hydroacoustic detectors deployed by many countries. In addition, there are no water phenomena that could be confused with a nuclear explosion.
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Therefore, if a country wants to try to hide a nuclear test, it would be best to conduct it underground. While the seismic waves generated can be very strong from a nuclear explosion, nature has an even stronger method of generating seismic waves: earthquakes! The only way to tell about them is by triangulating the exact position, because earthquakes very, very rarely occur at a depth of 100 meters or less, and nuclear tests (so far) have always taken place at a shallow depth underground.
To that end, the countries that signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty have set up seismic stations around the world to sniff out any nuclear tests that are in progress.
International Nuclear Test Tracking System, showing five major test types and all station locations. A total of 337 known stations are currently active
It is this act of seismic monitoring that allows us to draw conclusions about how powerful the explosion was and where on the Earth - in three dimensions - it took place. The North Korea seismic event that occurred in 2016 has been recorded around the world; 337 active monitoring stations throughout the Earth were sensitive enough for this. According to the U. S. Geological Survey, on January 6, 2016, North Korea experienced the equivalent of a 5.1 earthquake at a depth of 0.0 kilometers. Based on the magnitude of the earthquake and seismic waves that were recorded, we can recover the amount of released energy - in the order of 10 kilotons of TNT equivalent - and understand whether it was a nuclear explosion or not.
Thanks to the sensitivity of the observation stations, the depth, magnitude and position of the explosion that caused the Earth to shake on January 6, 2016 can be clearly established
The most important clue, in addition to indirect evidence of the magnitude and depth of the earthquake, comes from the types of seismic waves generated. In general, there are S- and P-waves, shear, or secondary, and compressional waves, which are sometimes called primary. Earthquakes are known to produce the most powerful S-waves compared to P-waves, and nuclear tests generate more powerful P-waves. And so North Korea claims that it was a hydrogen (fusion) bomb, which is much more deadly than fission bombs. While the energy released by fission-based uranium or plutonium bombs has a yield on the order of 2-50 kilotons of TNT equivalent, hydrogen bombs release energy thousands of times more powerful. The event's record holder is the Soviet Tsar Bomb with a capacity of 50 megatons of TNT equivalent.
The explosion of Tsar Bomba in 1961 was the largest nuclear explosion on Earth and became one of the most important for further determining the fate of nuclear weapons
Worldwide waveforms indicate that this is not an earthquake. So yes, North Korea most likely detonated a nuclear bomb. But which one? There is a difference between fusion and fission bombs:
- A nuclear fission bomb takes a heavy element with a lot of protons and neutrons, such as isotopes of uranium or plutonium, and bombards them with neutrons that can be captured by the nucleus. When capture occurs, a new, unstable isotope is born that dissociates into smaller nuclei, releasing energy, as well as additional free neutrons, allowing a chain reaction to begin. If done correctly, a huge number of atoms can go through this reaction, converting millions of milligrams or even grams of matter into pure energy using the formula E = mc2.
“A fusion-based thermonuclear bomb takes light elements like hydrogen and uses tremendous energies, temperatures and pressures to fuse those elements into heavier ones like helium, releasing even more energy than a fission bomb. The temperature and pressure are so high that the only way to create a thermonuclear bomb is to surround a fusion pellet with a fission bomb, so that a huge burst of energy can trigger the fusion reaction. Up to a kilogram of a substance can be converted into pure energy at the stage of synthesis.
Many people confuse testing with fission and fusion bombs. But scientists distinguish them unmistakably
In terms of energy output, the North Korean jolt was undoubtedly caused by a fission bomb. If this were not so, then it would be the weakest, most effective explosion with a fusion reaction on the planet, which even in theory cannot be created. On the other hand, there is clear evidence that it was precisely an explosion with a fission reaction, since the records of seismic stations showed an incredibly similar explosion in 2013, all in North Korea.
The difference between naturally occurring earthquakes shown in blue and a nuclear test shown in red leaves no doubt about the nature of such an event.
In other words, all the data that we have point to one conclusion: the fission reaction, not fusion, was the basis of this nuclear explosion. And it was definitely not an earthquake. S- and P-waves have proven that North Korea is detonating nuclear bombs in violation of international law, but seismic reports, despite the remoteness, show that these are not fusion bombs. North Korea has nuclear technology from the 1940s. Even if world leaders lie, Earth will tell the truth.
Ilya Khel