Posted on 08/27/2006 7:28:21 AM PDT by jdm
A minor explosion caused a small man-made earthquake in North Korea on Friday, but it was not a nuclear test, the Korea Institute of Geoscience & Mineral Resources said. "At 4 p.m. on Friday, we sensed an artificial earthquake wave which seemed to originate from near Pangyo, in the North's Gangwon province, but it has absolutely nothing to do with a North Korean nuclear test," an official at the institute said in a telephone interview with the JoongAng Ilbo on Saturday. "If the North conducted a nuclear test, our center would have sensed an earthquake wave of a magnitude above 4.0 on the Richter scale. The earthquake's magnitude was around 2.0, which can be created when two tons of TNT are exploded," the official said.
He said such man-made earthquakes have occasionally occurred in the North. "A lot of construction has reportedly been going on in Pangyo," he said. The institute operates earthquake watch centers nationwide. Kang Il-bum, a researcher at the institute, said, "If North Korea had conducted a secret underground nuclear test, radars established by the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons would have detected it."
This must have been what was happening:
SEOUL, Aug. 27 (Yonhap) -- North Korea said Sunday it conducted a large-scale blast operation two days ago for a waterway project.
The operation was carried out on Friday in a reservoir at Goksan county of Hwanghae province near the border with the South's Gangwon province, the North's Korean Central Broadcasting Station reported.
Source: http://english.yna.co.kr/Engnews/20060827/430100000020060827225549E5.html
Yah, sure, you betcha. I can't tell you how often me and the boys haul 2 tons of TNT into a cave when we are trying to escavate some stumps out of the surrounding county.
Here's a hint.... we know North Korea is building a nuclear arsenal .... does a nuclear explosion have to be bigger than a 2.0 on the Ricter scale? Maybe they are testing the yield of smaller nuclear bombs? Make a small nuke, test the yield; then all you have to do is scale the data to make a big nuke.
Good gosh. Beat me to it on the first post...
radars established by the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons would have detected it.
Radar?
If it were a nuke test, our govt. would be shouting it from the rooftops.
Maybe they got a fizzle instead of a fission.
Azmat-suited contractors indicate another new daycare center being erected.
Maybe it was an attempt to eliminate the chia boy?
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/09/12/nkorea.blast/
Not the first time
Azmat? Might that be the Aussie hazmat team?
Nuclear explosions have telltale seismic signatures which differentiate them from earthquakes. If N. Korea had detonated a device, believe me, we would know about it.
An who could forget . . . . http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,117872,00.html
This would make sense.
>Fizzle?
Agree
Hardest part of nuc explosion is getting all the fisionable materiel to become involved before force of reaction blows it apart.
> Probably NK faking a nuke test.
Or PRK science slaves faking a nuclear orgasm for
Fearless Leader. If so, he won't be happy with these
foreign reports of "not nuke".
Kim Jong Il and a bean burrito.
If there is a water project there it will easy to verify. Two tons is not a lot of explosives to use in construction or in a quarry site.
Or it could have been a nuclear "fizzle".
Not saying that's it for sure, but it could be.
Fearess reader needs to learn to fake an EM pulse to go along with his ground shanking.
Dang it, ASA VET, there you go again ruining a perfectly scary and poorly written pr piece with an injection of truth via a question:
"radars established by the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons would have detected it.
Radar?
Maybe they were making a bigger underground chamber than what they had there, in order to better conduct the nuke test to follow.
calibration test
"2 tons of TNT exploded at the same time in the same place? I call BS that it's construction. Probably NK faking a nuke test."
More likely, IMHO, is that this was a live test of the "conventional" shaped charge trigger for a nuke.....or the construction is for the test facility....or they may even be telling the stone truth.
Even a complete "fizzle" would have enough of the characteristics of a nuke test to be detected as such.
This sounds like you might actually believe it. Don't be quite so sure....
I hung up the foil helmet a long time ago.
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