North Korea announces successful hydrogen bomb test
bbc.com
bbc.com
Meanwhile, CNN is proclaiming "N. KOREA TESTS H-BOMB" on their front page, which is a pretty far cry from them claiming to have tested one.
and cnn is as usual profiting off FUD
Natural: http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5169662
but is it still a proof of h-bomb? maybe just ordinary (if you could call it so) nuclear bomb test?
The colon I guess denotes that what is to the right was said by what is to the left. Perhaps thats a tricky way to say it.
https://twitter.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/68457996242311987...
That being said, 44kT is still way below what one would expect for a fusion bomb, and low even for a boosted fission bomb.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale#Nuclear...
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=44&lat=37.7564509&lng...
I selected London, England and it immediately centered the blast on the Houses of Parliament. How sentient is that!
http://theaviationist.com/2013/02/18/wc-135-nuclear-sniffer/
Earthquakes virtually always develop over both time and space -- the "epicenter" of an earthquake is the center or origin of the movement. Some quakes occur over very long rupture zones -- the 2004 Boxing Day quake off the coast of Indonesia involved several hundred km of fault line, and moved along that fault at several hundred km/hr (this is among the reasons why major quakes can be felt over several minutes -- the rupture is literally happening over that duration, and, depending on the location of the observer, the seismic waves have to travel back to them).
An atomic blast begins and ends within a few thousands of a second -- at the seismic scale it's both instantaneous and a point event.
A bomb will vent radioactive fission/fusion products and their decay products, many of which are radioactive, and have signatures specific to the type of weapon and design used. Even underground blasts will typically vent detectable quantities to the surface and atmosphere.
[1] https://twitter.com/drrocks1982/status/684616925079552000
Were they actually able to produce a 9MT weapon, it would be more than half as strong as the largest weapons test the US ever conducted.
Whereas the UK just plain lied and continues to be evasive about the matter to this day - probably because the exercise was mostly aimed at the US.
Bear in mind that this was in the context of the British feeling betrayed by the Americans on nuclear research - from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Energy_Act_of_1946 :
"Implementing the McMahon Act created a substantial rift between United States and Britain. The new control of 'restricted data' prevented the United States' allies from receiving any information, despite the fact that the British and Canadian governments, before contributing technology and manpower to the Manhattan Project, had made agreements with the United States about the post-war sharing of nuclear technology. Those agreements had been formalized in the 1943 Quebec Agreement. In the case of the United Kingdom, these were developed further in the 1944 Hyde Park Agreement, which was signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapple#Grapple_X
It had to be an h-bomb. The korean people have been told that the regime already has nuclear weapons. So any test has to be a marked improvement. The only way up from nuclear is thermonuclear. Whether that H contributed anything meaningful to the force of the blast is very much secondary (pun intended).
Antimatter. Thankfully we have no idea how to make them yet.
By the the time of Deng, North Korea was well established and successive Chinese leaders have simply tried to maintain the status quo.
If Saddam really had nuclear weapons, there would have been no Iraq war and no ISIS today.
Nuclear weapons are far from the only thing that can be used as leverage.
Totally agree with you about the Iraq war and ISIS though.
Would it be enough to take out North Korea's nuclear capability and cripple troop encampments on the DMZ enough that they can't immediately launch a massive counterattack on South Korea?
"Oooo a present! What is it?"
"It's a T-shirt with a giant logo reading "FUCK YOU CHINA", with a red bullseye painted on the back. Like it?"
That said, if Japan decided it _wanted_ nuclear weapons, it can almost certainly produce them itself very quickly (order of 6-12 months according to most estimates I've seen). They have the raw fissile material due to their longstanding nuclear power plant program, and the general knowhow and infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_progra... has some more data.
There are better ways to deal with this. Diplomacy ... perhaps
It's not worth it to the U.S. or anyone else to invade, lose 30K-100K soldiers and then have to rebuild the country, and it never has been. The nuclear arms race serves partially as a deterrent against possible invasion, and partially an attempt to get people to the negotiating table for some resources by scaring Japan and N. Korea enough that they want to deal with this.
But if they had the capability, they still don't have the desire to use it as a first strike since that would give every country around + the U.S. a reason to bomb them to the ground.
What definition of "worked" are you using? Serious question.
"Diplomacy hasn't worked" is junk to say but "attacked no-one" isn't right either.
NK falling is considered terrible by all parties. South Korea can't absorb it. China can't absorb it. It's a hot potato no one wants.
That said, all-out massive attack isn't viable. there would be no way to disguise the political and military preparations for such an attack, and China wouldn't allow it anyway. Bear in mind the the South Korean capital Seoul is within medium artillery range of the border, and there are a lot of North Korean artillery pieces aimed at it. Even without a nuclear attack capability, North Korea could do them an awful lot of damage in ways that would be difficult to prevent.
You could move the government, but it wouldn't matter. Seoul would still completely dominate South Korea. Their entire economy and around half their population is based in the Seoul metro area. It's only a mild exaggeration to say that Seoul is South Korea.
The problem is, they have hundreds (thousands?) of artillery pieces buried in mountain bedrock and pointed at Seoul. Even if we dropped paratroopers on Great Leader's palace and captured him in the first two hours, it is simply not possible to find, let alone knock out, all of the artillery within a few days, which is how long it would take for them to level Seoul.
...If any of them still work. An awful lot of NK's military equipment hasn't been maintained for decades and has rusted solid where it sits. So the artillery could be one big bluff, for all we know. But can we risk it, with South Korea's largest city at stake?
Update: apparently I wasn't the only person to think of this: http://www.nknews.org/2014/07/how-israels-iron-dome-could-he...
I wonder how much they'd ask.
Calling him "Bush 41" makes him sound more like a nu metal band than a former president.
You can see the Sausage in the pics on the Wikipedia page:
For civilians, we generally think and worry about bombs targeting cities, but most nuclear weapons are actually aimed at military targets. The primary targets are the enemy's own nuclear weapons, military assets and infrastructure come second and population centres last of all. The point of nuclear deference isn't that if we have a war mum and dad will be killed, it's that everyone will be killed.
The fact is we have vast amounts of direct testimony from US and Russian military personnel and leaders, both at the time and in subsequent interviews books and testimony, that deterrence was the primary consideration in their defensive and offensive planning.
Humbug:
"“The authors developed a plan for the ‘systematic destruction’ of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted ‘population’ in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin and Warsaw,” Burr pointed out. “Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se (as opposed to military installations with civilians nearby).”
But other contemporary sources make it abundantly clear the Pentagon saw any person tied to a war effort as a viable military target. A now declassified 1952 U.S. Navy film on chemical and biological warfare specifically states a goal “to incapacitate the enemy’s armed forces and that portion of his human population that directly supports them.” With similar thoughts in mind, the U.S. Army had looked into radiological warfare and built deadly dirty bombs."
(http://warisboring.com/articles/this-cold-war-study-is-a-cat...)
Civilians have always been targets and always will be.
nevertheless the fact remains that most nuclear weapons are tactical or mid-range and therefore not primarily suitable for population attack. The primary reason Russian tank divisions didn't swoop through Germany in the 1950s wasn't because atom bombs would rain down on Moscow (although they would) it was because atom bombs would rain down on the tank divisions.
Is that some sort of minimum for a quake, or did they dig down 10,000m to fire this thing off? That seems rather deep even for a large bomb, which this wasn't.
The 10km was interesting since if it held up, it would have likely ruled out a test, but it turns out that the first readings were wrong.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/05/asia/north-korea-seismic-event...
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us10004bnm#...
Its profitable to be a kingpin in the NK chain of command. Its what the dick waving of nuclear arms is - look, we have a bomb, give us more free shit.
And it isn't even the threat of war. Its a threat of jumping the shark so they have to be conquered, leaving the region with 25 million destitute refugees to somehow deal with. Just for comparison, the EU is having huge trouble dealing with 11 million Syrian refugees and only 4 million have fled the country.
http://anti-imperialism.com/2014/08/14/western-dprk-propagan...
It's important that there be Mutually Assured Destruction between North Korea the imperialist US-backed South Korea.
We have nuclear weapons. Who are we to say that North Korea shouldn't have them? That just wouldn't be fair.
Any regime which systemstically implements slave labor, mass starvation, and utter lack of human rights should not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.
We do not want mutually assured destruction, especially with a nation controlled by a non-rational actor. The principle won't operate.
Unfortunately, it is now too late. North Korea has a fusion bomb. Once second closer on the doomsday clock.
Can we hurry up and create strong AI already, before someone gets everyone killed?
EDIT: Somehow I didn't expect that offhand ha-ha-only-serious comment to kick off a massive discussion about the capabilities of AI. Fun, but not my intention.
Many of the folks thinking about and working on solutions to existential risk consider AI pretty much the universal solution (and, at the same time, consider unfriendly AI one of the notable existential threats).
What makes you think that would happen?
Be logically consistent please, either people will not set off nukes, and also program AI "correctly".
Or they will set off nukes and program AI "wrong".
In either case AI has nothing to do with safety from nukes.
Strong AI is not a God, it does not have the ability to do the things you are imagining. Among other problems, what makes you think those things are even possible in the first place? No matter how good the AI, it still has to follow the laws of physics.
I certainly hope the set of people with access to nuclear weapons would not be the same people building AI, or we'd indeed be quite screwed.
> In either case AI has nothing to do with safety from nukes.
> Strong AI is not a God, it does not have the ability to do the things you are imagining. Among other problems, what makes you think those things are even possible in the first place? No matter how good the AI, it still has to follow the laws of physics.
The laws of physics would govern the computational substrate on which everything else runs; what runs on that substrate can emulate anything it likes. The major assumption I'm making is that we can successfully build strong AI (AI capable of self-improvement past human), which seems plausible but not a given.
Well, in fact they are, (or would be) the exact same people. But despite that we won't be "screwed".
Or did you think that if strong AI showed up the Governments of the whole world would not rush to have their own?
> what runs on that substrate can emulate anything it likes.
At what speed though? It's not clear that an emulation in a computer would be anywhere near as fast as the actual thing (i.e. a human), so it might not actually be possible to upload people digitally. (If nothing else, the speed of light limits how fast you can run a CPU.) It's also not so obvious that it's even possible to copy a brain, never mind running one.
All your assumptions are predicated on the ability to emulate a human in software, if that's not possible then none of what you wrote about strong AI will happen, instead people will continue to be people and AI will just be another thing to ignore just like we ignore all the marvels we have now.
> The major assumption I'm making is that we can successfully build strong AI (AI capable of self-improvement past human), which seems plausible but not a given.
An even larger assumption is that it's even possible to do that. Never mind can we. Can an intelligence program something smarter than itself? I don't think so. I don't think the AI can, I don't think humans can.
So far the only known method of making a smarter version of something is by random permutation and picking the best one. It's not an accident that all AI used today is by that method. I'm not aware of any that are programmed from first principles.
Governments can't "rush" on the same scale an AI can, and a strong AI with an appropriate value function wouldn't permit the existence of any other strong AI that doesn't share its value function (since such an AI would fall somewhere between "counterproductive" and "potential existential threat"), nor would "of their own" have any meaning unless that value function was hopelessly broken.
There shouldn't be a "second" strong AI, only a first.
> It's not clear that an emulation in a computer would be anywhere near as fast as the actual thing
Humans operate relatively slowly on the scale of computers; we're just massively parallel and have a fundamentally different architecture. That's not at all insurmountable even for human-built technology, let alone technology-built technology.
> All your assumptions are predicated on the ability to emulate a human in software
Several of my assumptions are, true, though I can imagine other possibilities that would have similar effect.
> An even larger assumption is that it's even possible to do that.
That's not a larger assumption, that's the same assumption I stated.
> Can an intelligence program something smarter than itself? I don't think so.
On what basis?
> I don't think humans can.
Humans don't have to build a system smarter than ourselves, just build one as smart as ourselves and run it a lot faster with access to a lot more data.
Or in other words AI has nothing to do with nukes since what AI does has no bearing on if nukes will be set off.
Who's to say strong AI will even be significantly smarter than us anyway? What if humans are almost as smart (obviously there's some room for improvement) as it's physically possible to be? Truth be told we really don't know that much about consciousness or intelligence.
By definition of strong AI: AI capable of self-improvement past human levels; the assumption in my post is that it's possible to build strong AI.
> What if humans are almost as smart (obviously there's some room for improvement) as it's physically possible to be? Truth be told we really don't know that much about consciousness or intelligence.
We don't know that much, but we know enough to make reasonable predictions, and from all the available information, it seems rather exceedingly unlikely that humanity is the ultimate unsurpassable plateau of sapient thought. We have approximately zero evidence to support a hypothesis that humanity is anywhere near the physical limits on the capabilities of a mind, and plenty of evidence to support the hypothesis that we're not even close.
Wait, that doesn't make sense.
Interesting, I hadn't seen that one. While that doesn't give a very good impression of what the timescale could be (though it actually seems fairly plausible for an uploaded human that just runs faster with more data but doesn't attempt iterative self-improvement), it does suggest at least some possibilities in ways I haven't seen in other movies, and in relatively few short stories.
> That said, I don't think I'd constitute the conflation of any human mind and supercomputing as friendly.
"Friendly AI" is a specific term of art, referring to AI that values sentient beings, and whose value function involves modeling and satisfying the value functions of sentient beings. (Its opposite, "unfriendly AI", refers to any AI that doesn't value sentient beings; that doesn't just mean "actively hostile", but also simply "doesn't explicitly care", either one of which would create an existential threat. For instance, a paperclip-building AI that sees people as another source of matter that isn't paperclips yet.)
Almost all sentient beings tend to hold their own continued existence in high value.
Comparatively, teaching/programming a system to have morality seems like a safer bet than giving the reins to a being whose psyche was sculpted by evolution.
Because living batteries are clearly absurd.
Five countries detonated 2,000 nukes over 35 years. You could simultaneously set off every existing nuclear warhead inside of Wyoming and it would have a negligible health impact on most of the rest of humanity. You couldn't come even remotely close to killing everyone with nukes, unless the global arsenals were vastly expanded; the US alone has 27,000 cities. Russia's entire stockpile could kill at worst 1/3 of all Americans, assuming they all worked properly and hit their targets. The notion that nuclear war could end the human race, is entirely a myth (which is not to downplay the actual damage such would cause).
The desire has always been to make sure everyone is properly afraid of a nuclear war, because of the destruction it would indeed cause. It's desirable for it to be considered off the table entirely, a true last resort response. There is a large gulf between an outcome that destroys all of the relevant cities in the US and ending the human race. The 'mistake' is an intentional over-estimation of how much destruction the whole can cause (Why? To properly cause immense fear, so global nuclear war is thought of as a humanity ending event; and that's probably sane reasoning). Back in reality, only a few nations would be heavily destroyed, and the amount of radiation most of the rest of countries would absorb wouldn't matter in regards to survival.
Some will claim it would cause nuclear winter, destroy the global food and fresh water supply etc. It wouldn't come close to causing that. Nearly the entire planet would remain fundamentally just fine (the nukes would be focused on urban areas anyway). We know for a fact that large numbers of nuclear detonations (eg 178 in 1962) don't just magically spread globally and start killing everyone via destroying the food supply or other similar mass outcome events. Specific small areas of the planet would not be fine of course, they would be completely destroyed. An extremely small percentage of arable land could be destroyed, even if it was specifically targeted. Within less than a century you'd never know a global nuclear war occurred as far as obvious signs in nature are concerned, outside of the specific areas that were hit.
That aside, widespread radiation would ruin significantly larger areas (nuclear test sites intentionally avoid areas and conditions that would allow the spread of fallout, whereas bombardment would not); destruction of numerous functions of society and common services would kill many more.
Whether some subset of humanity would survive or not, this at the very least seems like a scenario well worth preventing.
Take out the big university cities, big finance cities, some semiconductor manufacturers and some ports and we back into victorian era.
North Korea not having a nuclear weapon is so much more important than nobody having one, that the two discussions have virtually nothing to do with each other.
It's not one is just a slightly greater degree than the other, they are so different they are not even in the same ballpark.
And what does having just one planet have at all to do with nuclear weapons? I'm not seeing the connection. All the nuclear bombs on earth would do nothing whatsoever to the planet, and barely anything to the inhabitants except for a minority of them.
And then the sudden jump to strong AI? Hu? That came out of nowhere.
You imply that strong AI has some sort of connection to "everyone killed", first of all, how exactly would everyone get killed anyway? Humans don't have the ability to do that, not today.
And strong AI would, if anything, make it easier to do that, not harder.
So your post really is quite perplexing if you actually read it.
Not to mention that nuclear winter is a very real (though unproven) concern.
No, that is simply not true. Not in the slightest.
Rational actors believing they are proceeding in the best interests of their countries can allow a situation to escalate and cause the mutual annihilation of their civilizations. This was the case when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were heads of their respective states.
No one should have these weapons.
But North Korea not having them is so much more important that even mentioning other countries in the same discussion is ludicrous.
No you are not. You are being simplistic and trying to make a point with meaningless platitudes.
Intellectual "shortcuts" like that will not lead you to any sort of understanding.
My arguments was that it doesn't matter what one is claiming - in the end what matters is what you do. The americans are the only ones so far to have nuked other people, and they still get to keep their missiles. Don't you think we are way too forgiving with them?
And Americans have lots of bombs and don't use them. North Korea on the other hand tortures people routinely for fun (not for intelligence or other excuses, but literally for fun).
> The americans are the only ones so far to have nuked other people
They did that on the dawn of the Nuclear era when no one understood the impact or nuclear weapons. After the first two they understood things better - any not only never used them again, but worked to make sure no one else would either.
> Don't you think we are way too forgiving with them?
Not in the slightest.
I, for one, do not.
---
Sidenote:
The most remarkable aspect of the story of the atomic bomb occurred after the development of fusion weapons.
The President and his chief advisors called together a committee to determine whether to wipe out the Soviet Union. The discussion took place in the Roosevelt Room shortly following the development of the hydrogen bomb.
With its massive bomber fleet, unparalleled fusion technology, and large stockpile of fission weapons, the United States could have quite literally conquered the world.
Yet it chose not to do so. I know of no parallel in world history where such an event has occurred.
Prior to the conference, Hans Bethe of the Manhattan project wrote to the President:
"If we fight a war and win it with nuclear weapons, what history will remember is not the ideas we were fighting for, but the methods we used to accomplish them.
These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan, who brutally killed every last inhabitant of Persia."
But not on other humans. On a deserted island. We like to vilify the russians, sure we do - but when you look at the facts as they are, a very different picture comes to your eyes. Don't let those manipulative news stories fool you.
I like this quote. What I like even more, is how just above it, you smudge the history as if they not detonated nuclear weapon on people, but they just refrained from conquering the world. Read what I said the same thread - in the end, what matter is what you actually do, not what you could have done, or what you claimed you would do.
Hell, Stalin told Truman to use it on Imperial Japan as soon as possible.
I know there is a plan, by which they reduce the ammount of nuclear warheads, but to me it seems like they are dragging their feets, looking suspicious on one another. Have they wished it, they would be long gone, serving as fuel in some reactor.
Getting back to North Korea - I don't think something can be done without causing a major conflict. Leaving them be is not safe either, but there must be a peaceful way. If the problem is that Kim Jong-un is paranoid and crazy - he'll die eventually, and if not provoked, I hope things go smooth.
A lot of the world revolves around trust - even if blind, stupid trust. A crazy enough guy could poison the bread in the supermaket, and there's not much one can do about it. I think this is somewhat similar.
By the great american plan I mean sharing the same system of government, signing good' ol' threaties that favor american corporations (TPP, PIPA, SOPA, and whatnot). They did a great job spreading democracy in middle east, while mostly Europe ended up taking the heat. I hope they won't start spreading democracy there as well, because pushing it by force didn't seem very effective.
Absent the risk of escalation, I find it unlikely that the various crises wouldn't have escalated too, at least, the take over of west Berlin (and thus probably a subsequent land war in west Germany).
North Korea could probably kill a sizable chunk of the 25 million people living in the metro area of Seoul, but would otherwise not be able to inflict harm on the US, at least not yet. And we would be their nuclear retaliator if they attacked anyone - we know all their military bases, and a nuclear attack on South Korea would see instant retaliation upon all their installations.
While China does not want to deal with the refugee crisis that would result from a post-NK scenario, they would definitely never fight the US directly because they know full well that doomsday scenario would play out in nuclear war with the US.
This is an n-body problem, and one of those particles is a borderline insane government.
http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/12/18/n...
Since they simply take what they want from the rest of the populous, the desires of the rest of the people simply don't matter enough.
[1] http://uskoreainstitute.org/research/visiting-scholars/past-...
[2]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-ko...
This sort of stuff would be really really bad to fabricate IMO, considering the scale of known-true suffering going on in North Korea.
There's no way they can destroy America. In the most lucky(??) case, they might be able to destroy a city or two before getting wiped out.
I doubt they could destroy even South Korea. (Sure, they can kill millions, but South Korea is kinda democratic enough to survive that, and you can bet my ass that the North Korean regime will be wiped out.)