Is North Korea LYING about successful hydrogen bomb test? Experts pour scorn on Kim Jong-un’s claims, saying the explosion was nowhere near powerful enough
Pyongyang claim to have tested a thermonuclear weapon this morning
Explosion triggered 5.1-magnitude earthquake which was felt for miles
But experts say the tremors were not big enough to be a hydrogen bomb
U.N Security Council will meet later today to discuss what steps to take
By EUAN MCLELLAND and SIMON TOMLINSON
DailyMail.com
6 January 2016
Nuclear experts have cast serious doubts on North Korea’s claims that it had detonated a hydrogen bomb, saying the resulting seismic activity suggested a far smaller device.
The hermit nation crowed on state TV that it had carried out a ‘perfect’ H-bomb test this morning, an explosion that triggered a 5.1-magnitude earthquake.
But scientists and intelligence agencies were quick to dismiss the report, saying the size of the blast was too small to have come from such a weapon and was likely disguised to appear like one.
As opposed to the atomic bomb, like the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, a hydrogen device can be up to 1,000 times more powerful.
However, South Korea’s spy agency said the blast from North Korea’s device produced an explosive yield of just six kilotons, even smaller than Hiroshima’s.
South Korean lawmaker Lee Cheol Woo, who sits on the parliament’s intelligence committee, says the agency told him that even a failed hydrogen bomb detonation typically yields tens of kilotons.
While an atomic bomb uses just nuclear fission (the splitting of atoms), a hydrogen version uses fission as a first-stage detonation to set off a fusion (combining of atoms) reaction, generating temperatures similar to those found at the sun’s core.
This could mean that North Korea’s test was successful at the fission stage, but failed to produce the resulting fusion reaction.
North Korea does have A-bomb technology: its first three nuclear tests, from 2006 to 2013, were devices on roughly the same scale as the ones used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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