It’s all over the news and TV:

          North Korea Threatens To Attack The US With

NUCLEAR WEAPONS!

             PESTILENCE! FAMINE! PLAGUE! WAR!

            North Korea’s nukes don’t worry me much, because I understand the technical (nuclear) side.  I’m going to tell you why you don’t need to worry, either.

Frankly, the North Korean “nuclear crisis” is much more interesting than the White House – Congress  “budget crisis”.  As I’m sure you know, that’s degenerated into both sides saying, “The Other Guy Is The Problem”.  If you’ve ever driven a long distance with small children, you’ll recognize this:

“Mom! He took my book!”  “Dad, she’s touching me, make her stop!”

“Are we there yet?”    I want their mothers to spank them and say, “Play Nice!”

This is government-by-boredom, a new kind of democracy where the people who remain awake are the only ones who vote.

The whole budget “crisis” is down to: “White House Closes Restrooms For Tour Groups”. And all this is about enough money to run the US for… well… probably a tenth of a second. (I’d give you an exact number, but, alas, my calculator fell asleep looking at the numbers.)

Editors call these type of budget articles “MEGO”, short for “My Eyes Glaze Over”, and nowadays such articles are placed on page 93, next to the cartoons. Which is curiously appropriate.

But now we have a NUCLEAR CRISIS!

Newspaper editors and TV reporters love having something exciting to talk about. The editors get to break out their really big fonts and write compelling headlines about NUCLEAR WEAPONS POINTED RIGHT AT YOUR HOUSE!  The TV reporters line up next to the North Korea/South Korea border, at “THE LINE OF DOOM”, and talk about how evil the North Korean government is. Well, it is very evil … but that’s not what this article is about.

This “crisis” is going to fade out any time now (so I’d better hurry and finish this and post it). Over the last decade or so North Korean has learned to scare everybody with dim-bulb nuclear threats, then they accept some food and maybe fuel oil, in exchange for them not blathering about the word “nuclear” anymore. Then the  NUCLEAR CRISIS is over, for another four years or so.

So let’s talk about this for a bit, and I’ll show you why this doesn’t worry me.

What The Heck Is A “Kiloton” And Why Should I Care?

            I’m going to explain why I think the North Korea nuclear program is a snore. To do that, I need to introduce you to a new term, “kiloton”. It sounds complex, but it isn’t. (Many scientific words sound complex, but when you find out what they actually are, they’re very easy.)

A ton is 2,000 pounds.  I bet you knew that. (Yes, I know that other countries have different definitions of “ton”, but bear with me, okay?)  In our case here, it’s 2,000 pounds of TNT explosive.

Trust me on this: One pound of TNT makes a pretty big bang! Two thousand pounds of TNT make a huge Bang!

But we’re not up to nuclear level bangs yet.

So let’s take a “kilo”, which just means 1,000 of something. You’ve run into this term before. For example, a “kilogram” is 1,000 grams, (about 2.2 pounds). A “kilometer” is 1,000 meters (about two thirds of a mile).

(A “kilopage” is how many pages are in a Congressional Budget. … sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

So, we take our ton of TNT, add a “kilo” to the word, and we get one thousand tons of TNT.

So a ton is 2,000 pounds and we have 1,000 of those tons.

Multiply those, and you get: 2 million pounds of TNT going off.

Now we’re cooking on a nuclear stove!

2 million pounds of TNT going off is called “one kilo-ton”.   (“One thousand” of “two thousand pound tons”.) This amount, the “size” of the bang!, is called the “yield”. So we say, “1 kiloton yield”.

(Just by the way, often “kiloton” is abbreviated to “Kt.” Now you know how to talk about nuclear weapons.)

2 million pounds of TNT going off?

WHAMMO!!

And we’re still not quite there yet!

One kiloton is a very small nuclear weapon. Very, very small. Pretty much the smallest.  Now, as far as we know, since 1945, every country that has ever tried to set off a nuclear weapon has succeeded on the first try, including the US. They typically get 20 kilotons yield. (40 million pounds of TNT). The US, the USSR, China, England, France, Pakistan, India, and places I’ve forgotten .. they all got 20 kilotons their first try.

Except for … North Korea.

Its first try, in 2006, was a fizzle. A very expensive, embarrassing fizzle.  This makes the North Korean nuclear scientists the most incompetent nuclear scientists in history.

And that’s the main reason I’m not worried about North Korea, because while they’ve run tests, they’ve never even gotten to 20 Kt – the starting point, which every other country reached on their first try.

You ask, how do we know this? Good question!

When you thump the ground nuclear-hard, you get a minor earthquake, which can be picked up by a seismograph. During the years of Soviet nuclear testing, the US got really good at looking at a seismograph and figuring out the yield.  We’re still excellent at this.

Also, generally, when you set off a kiloton, even if you do it underground, some hot gasses leak out. These are elements you get when you split uranium atoms. Some of the more popular elements are strontium, cesium, xenon, and other stuff. So we wait for the winds to bring the North Korean test gasses east to the ocean, then we send an aircraft to sample that air, and that tells us a very great deal about how big an explosion it was, how competently the weapon was made, and so forth.

North Korea is good at propaganda, and really bad at actually making a nuclear weapon.

A nuclear scientist told me this joke:  “We picked up two Bangs. The first was the fizzle. The second was their nuclear scientists being shot.”

What you’d like to see in your nuclear program is consistency. If your design for a 20Kt bomb works a few times, repeatably, then you have some confidence in that design. When the yields are all over the place, you know that either the design or the implementation is screwed up. We know that A.Q. Kahn, the Pakistani nuclear nut-job that sold nuclear weapon technology to many countries, also handed out an early Chinese nuclear weapon’s blueprints. That design works if a country is competent enough to build it properly.

There are several possible reasons why North Korea’s 2006 try fizzled. I know some of them, but the technical details of how a nuke goes wrong takes a lot of explaining, and I want to stay with their nuclear testing results for a bit.

2006: While trying for 20 Kt, they got a “fizzle”.  (less than 1 kiloton).

I’ve heard “possibly one-tenth of one kiloton.”

2009:  While trying for 20 Kt, they got… “3 to 20” kilotons.

2013: While (still!) trying for 20 Kt, they got, “6 to 7” kilotons.

The stated reason these are ranges and not exact is “We don’t understand the geology of their test site”. Well, possibly that’s true.

Fib?   Us?

But also think about this: Let’s say the US is really good at figuring out yields by seismographic records and air sampling. The US doesn’t want anyone else to know just how good they are! So we don’t say, “This was 6.475 kilotons yield. The ratios of xenon gas isotopes indicate that the test didn’t get 80 generations of neutrons, and their plutonium seems to be crudded up.”

That tells the world our detection capabilities. So, instead the US sort of mumbles and says, “The dog ate my homework. We think it was somewhere between 3 and 20 kilotons”.

I mean, it’s only the difference between 6 million pounds of TNT (3 Kt) and 40 million pounds of TNT (20 Kt). You’d think that would show up…

Other nations enjoy this game, too. They can give a high number (for example, only one nation reported “20Kt”), and this makes it look like they don’t know how to read a seismograph.  I’m not really worried about North Korea.

Terrorists

Well, okay, Dave, but what if North Korea gives some plutonium (or worse, a complete bomb) to a terrorist?

There’s a very good reason why this hasn’t happened.

You have to make plutonium atom-by-atom, by putting a rod of uranium into a nuclear reactor. The zillions of neutrons that fly around in a reactor can “stick” to one of the uranium atoms. That makes an element called “Neptunium”, which, after a little while, sneezes, and becomes Plutonium-239. The 239 just tells you how many neutrons are hanging around in the nucleus of these atoms.

But if you leave the rod in too long, additional neutrons can stick to the plutonium atom, forming Plutonium-240 and -241. These are very unwelcome. They’re very unstable and like to throw neutrons around for fun. They also “pre-detonate” and cause fizzles.

Every reactor is a little different; each uranium rod is a little different, and each batch of plutonium is different, in particular how much -240 and -241 crud up the plutonium.

After a nuclear explosion, you can pick up some of the plutonium particles in the vicinity, and analyze them. You get the exact numbers, then you look them up in a book. It’s very much like, “Okay, this plutonium was a 1966 batch from Hanford, WA, and separated using US methods in October.”

North Korea would have to be colossally stupid to give plutonium, which carries its history, to anyone. Because we would find out where that plutonium came from, and (probably) drop 350 kilotons on it.

Okay, Dave, But What About Their Missiles ?

North Korea has also been working on missiles. They started off with an extremely bad early Soviet design that we call the “SCUD”.  Iraq shot off SCUDs during the First Iraq War (“Desert Storm”). A SCUD is so inaccurate that about all you can say is that if you launch a SCUD, it will eventually come down somewhere.

It’s very difficult to overcome gravity and send a missile up. The missile needs to be 90% rocket fuel, if I’m remembering The Rocket Equation correctly. It’s best to do the launch in several stages; for example, the Saturn V rocket, that took us to the Moon, had three stages.

North Korea has been trying to put a satellite into orbit for some years now. The usual North Korea missile test is, launch, and about 30-90 seconds later, it explodes. They’re really having trouble seperating a spent stage and firing up the next stage.

The essential problem is bad quality assurance.

Finally, North Korea managed to put a satellite into orbit, just a few months ago. The Soviet Union did this with “Sputnik”, in 1957. That tells you how modern the North Korean missiles are: 56 year old technology. And the satellite appears to be tumbling, which makes it useless. It needs to point its cameras somewhere on the planet and point a radio transmitter at North Korea, and should know how to stay stable. Tumbling is a very bad sign. Back to the drawing boards.

If you’re going to launch a nuclear-tipped missile, you have to launch it in a “ballistic arc” at the target. It goes up through all the atmosphere, then flies awhile, and goes back down. One problem is re-entry, where the warhead comes back into the atmosphere. Friction with the air heats it up. Unless you’re able to make a heat shield that can take that sort of heat, your warhead will burn up, something like how the Columbia space shuttle burned up. There is no evidence that the North Koreans have made any progress on this at all.

If you want to launch a nuclear weapon, you need the warhead  to be as light as possible. (You want anything you launch to be as light as possible). Sputnik was 220 pounds and took the pretty awesome power of the Soviet rockets to launch.

The current North Korean nuclear weapons probably weigh several tons. If you put several tons on a North Korean missile and light it off, the missile will sit on the launch pad, so weighed down it can’t move.

Remember the 6-7 kiloton yield from their latest (inept) test?

This is still an embarrassing yield, and nuclear weapons are expensive. So the North Koreans tried to put their best “spin” on it as possible. Instead of the truth (“We got half of what we tried for”), they said it was a test of a “miniaturized nuclear weapon suitable for the warhead of a missile.”

(And around the world, nuclear scientists heard this and started snickering).

Of course, the Administration wants to look busy during a “crisis”. So we’re putting missile-defense units into Guam, and Various Officials have given news conferences in somber, serious tones about North Korea’s missiles and nuclear weapons.  Once we’ve //bribed// I mean, once we’ve sent North Korea food (“humanitarian aid”), they’ll knock it off with the nuclear threats… until 4 years more, judging by their testing record.

Bear in mind it was Jimmy Carter who negotiated the first //bribe// trade, promising the North Koreans this and that in exchange for their promise not to develop nuclear weapons. Jimmy got taken to the cleaners. The North Koreans developed nuclear weapons. This is the same Jimmy Carter who didn’t figure out that the Soviets had bad intentions until they invaded Afghanistan, so it’s not like we sent an expert to do this. North Korea learned from Carter that we will  //bribe// negotiate with them if they threaten in a nuclear manner.

What about that “miniature sized warhead”?

Since 1945, the US has gradually developed nuclear weapons that really are smaller and lighter. It’s been a long, hard job. We started with the 10,000 pound “Fat Man”. Over the next 68 years, we’ve learned how to miniaturize these things, and how to make their yield selectable. It took a bunch of bright people and over a thousand nuclear tests for us to come up with the small and efficient weapons that we put on our missiles. We have high confidence these missiles will work. We can launch a missile and put 350 kilotons anywhere we want.

North Korea hasn’t even gotten a starting-point yield, 20 kilotons. It’s extremely unlikely that they magically made 68 years of progress in four years.  It’s extremely likely that they know what to say to be scary.

Conclusion: North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons… What A Great Idea!

So, you see, everyone wins from this “crisis”.

North Korea gets something from their expensive, failing nuclear and missile programs.  The Administration gets to look good by “responding”.

Newspapers and TV get a great story, The Mad Dictator With Nuclear Weapons.

People like me roll their eyes and snicker.

Really, isn’t this more fun than the “budget crisis”? I mean, really?

I hope you’ve enjoyed this. I’m always interested in your comments.

Thanks,

– David Small

© April 9, 2013