Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Flying Dice]

Psh, everyone knows that the ecologically-friendly WMD of choice is the neutron bomb.

[Morrigi]

And about the migration crisis, what really strikes me the moderate view a year or two ago was border control and limited immigration, and mass deportations and razor wire were considered to be madness. The moderate view is now rapidly moving towards mass deportations and razor wire, and mass lynching is considered to merely be madness, instead of unthinkable. This could get out of hand.

That's just on the Republican side, unless you mean Europe.

I mean Europe. The American immigration problem is small potatoes compared to this disaster.

[Strife26]

It's kind of depressing to see news articles titled "What is a Hydrogen Bomb?"

You expect the average person to understand the different flavors of nukes?

[My Name is Immaterial]

It's kind of depressing to see news articles titled "What is a Hydrogen Bomb?"

You expect the average person to understand the different flavors of nukes?

Not to mention, but it's been a long time since there was any real threat of a nuclear attack.

[Shadowlord]

It's kind of depressing to see news articles titled "What is a Hydrogen Bomb?"

You expect the average person to understand the different flavors of nukes?

Not to mention, but it's been a long time since there was any real threat of a nuclear attack.

History is important! It's not even that long ago. Of course, my experience in school was that if a normal history class made it past world war II, it either ran out of time shortly after, or zipped through everything beyond at lightning speed.

[IronyOwl]

It's kind of depressing to see news articles titled "What is a Hydrogen Bomb?"

You expect the average person to understand the different flavors of nukes?

Not to mention, but it's been a long time since there was any real threat of a nuclear attack.

History is important! It's not even that long ago. Of course, my experience in school was that if a normal history class made it past world war II, it either ran out of time shortly after, or zipped through everything beyond at lightning speed.

There's an awful lot of it, and the subtle nuances of "large explosive things nobody ever uses but everyone is afraid somebody else will use" are kind of besides the point most of the time. Most people aren't familiar with the exact specifications of the average tank or the differences between various conventional warheads either.

[MrRoboto75]

The only thing I really know about the different types of nuclear bombs, is that they are typically more than enough to kill me, and a lot of other stuff with me.  And leave the resulting area mostly useless for a very long time.

If I had to wager a guess, an H-bomb works by fusing hydrogen together, whereas other nukes usually split uranium.

[Shadowlord]

Yeah. But historically you've needed to be able to reliably make a-bombs to be able to detonate an h-bomb because essentially a-bomb detonation is used to compress the hydrogen to initiate fusion. Also h-bombs are much bigger in yield than a-bombs. Reportedly NK's detonation wasn't strong enough to be one unless the hydrogen didn't undergo a chain reaction (it failed but the a-bomb trigger still detonated - or it was only an a-bomb in the first place).

[MetalSlimeHunt]

To be fair, such a failure would hardly be unreasonable for NK. I'll remind you of the time they launched a satellite and somehow managed to send it into an unrecoverable spin only after getting it into orbit.

[Sheb]

It could have been a Boosted fission bomb, a bob where the fission reaction is used to start a fusion reaction, but that fusion reaction doesn't provide much energy directly: it's main use is to produce neutrons to make the fission reaction more efficient.

[wierd]

I could see that..  An actual hydrogen bomb requires significant quantities of tritium and deuterium.  You get those via centrifuging ocean water then cracking the hydrogen. (Or, you can enrich the hydrogen by exposing said water to neutron emissions of the correct hardness for extended periods, THEN centrifuge and crack.)

A heavy water processing facility would draw the immediate attention of the various international nuclear regulatory agencies, because there really isn't a whole lot you do with heavy water on that kind of scale-- at least nothing NORTH Korea has demonstrated serious interest in. (It is used in a number of theoretical physics experiments, some medical applications, and a few others. All are things that Best Korea has shown almost pathological disdain for.)

The lack of appropriate processing facilities, the incorrectness of the seismic data of the device test, and the bombastic nature of Best Korea all kind of say that this was not a genuine staged nuclear device with a powerful secondary fusion cycle based explosive-- EG, an "H bomb".  Rather, it looks like either a conventional fission only nuke, like they have done in the past, or a boosted nuke, like Sheb suggests. (that would require significantly less pure, and less total quantities of those isotopes of hydrogen.)

Really, if Best Korea was trying to get attention, they could have done it with far more seriousness if they had stated that they were going to build a heavy water processing plant to further their nuclear program, then proceeded to do THAT instead of poisoning the ground someplace in their tiny little backward plot of ground for centuries to come.  But hey, PR machines are rarely known for being sensible.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Oh, by the way, that Mao statue from before got demolished as soon as it was finished. We consumerist dystopic moral story now.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

Why? By Who?

[Strife26]

I don't think that anyone's made a fusion weapon that hasn't needed a fission stage.

[wierd]

A pure fusion device would not be practical as a weapon, IMO.

While potentially much cleaner (within reason-- it IS a nuclear device) than a staged weapon or boosted weapon, the device would need to have an initial confinement system comparable to that of a sustained fusion power plant to reach enough energetic events to have an explosion of any significant output.  That would put the cost of manufacture and the number of required component parts outside the scope of a throw away device.  Focusing the concussive force, or the xray/microwave emissions of a fission device into a fusion capable material chamber to induce spontaneous fusion is much more practical.

Besides, a multi-stage device is more than capable enough.  The 50-100 megaton device detonated by the soviet union (Tsar Bomba) was only a 3 stage device-- theoretically, staged devices can go up to 7 stages in the reaction, with increasingly more energy dense fusion materials, and be significantly more powerful.  Unless you are trying to blow planets apart though, there's not a legitimate need for a device of that kind of explosive potential.

I could see Best Korea developing and testing a boosted device-- but that is different from a staged device.  When people say 'H bomb", they mean staged device.