Who Else Smells A Rat In Nork's Clothing...

Blast May Be Only a Partial Success, Experts Say

"Throughout history, the first detonations of aspiring nuclear powers have tended to pack the destructive power of 10,000 to 60,000 tons — 10 to 60 kilotons — of conventional high explosives.

But the strength of the North Korean test appears to have been a small fraction of that: around a kiloton or less, according to scientists monitoring the global arrays of seismometers that detect faint trembles in the earth from distant blasts.

A senior Bush administration official said he had learned through Asian contacts that the North Koreans had expected the detonation to have a force of about four kilotons. Because classified information was involved and there was lingering uncertainty, he would not let his name be used.

Philip E. Coyle III, a former director of weapons testing at the Pentagon and former director of nuclear testing for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons design center in California, said the small size of the test signaled the possibility of what might be described as a partial success or a partial failure.

“As first tests go, this is smaller and less successful than those of the other nuclear powers,” he said.

Perhaps the North Koreans wanted to keep it small, he added. “But if it turns out to be a kiloton or less,” Dr. Coyle said, “that would suggest that they hoped for more than that and didn’t get it.”

The United States Geological Survey said it had detected a tremor on the Korean Peninsula of 4.2 magnitude, which translates into an explosive force of roughly 1,000 tons. The agency listed 20 seismic stations as having initially picked up the blast’s shockwave, including nearby ones in China, Japan and South Korea as well as distant ones in Ukraine, Australia, Nevada and Wyoming."

Not that Lil Kimmy's scientists can do much of anything right, but it wouldn't be all that difficult for a government to assemble enough conventional explosives so simulate a kiloton. Bear in mind that he's a madman with a madman's lust for power and would resort to anything in order to frighten the liberals.

UPDATE

More and more experts are coming forth to say that whatever it was that caused the 4.2 earthquake in North Korea was NOT a nuclear explosion. Either the explosives designed to turn the plutonium core fissionable didn't make a big enough or precise enough boom, or the entire exercise was a con from the get-go. More news wil be available after radiation sampling procedures begin returning some hard data, but whatever Lil Kimmy did was sure enough to scare the absolute shit out of the loons, and for that we should at least thank him.