Posted on 06/23/2010 11:33:32 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Is Kim Jong-il building a new type of weapon?
On Monday Seoul announced that the Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety had detected unusually high levels of xenon gas near the North Korea border on May 14. The concentration of xenon was eight times higher than normal, and the presence of the gas is indicative of nuclear activities.
Because the wind was blowing south at the time, the source of the gas could not have been one of South Korea's nuclear plants. The xenon might have originated in China or Russia, but the most likely place was the land of unexplained events, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
This is a particularly good week to take stock of North Korea, the world's least comprehensible nation. Why? On Friday the regime headed by Kim Jong-il will celebrate the start of what it calls the "Great Fatherland Liberation War." On June 25, 1950, Kim Il-Sung, the current leader's dad, took South Korea and the U.S. by complete surprise by sending his forces south. In four days he had captured Seoul, and soon he pushed the South Korean and American armies into a small perimeter around the southern city of Pusan--in other words, almost into the sea.
Since then, he and his son, the current leader, have continued to surprise us. Among other crimes, the Kims snatched the Pueblo from international waters in 1968 and tortured the crew for 11 months. They also killed 31 American aviators downing an unarmed Navy reconnaissance plane in international airspace in 1969. They repeatedly used violence whenever trends were not going their way. That is perhaps the best explanation why a midget North Korean submarine torpedoed Cheonan, killing 46 South Korean sailors this March.
And the North's ability to surprise gets us back to the mysterious release of
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
It has to be a nuclear leak or accident. As far as I know(reading Yonhap and the Chosun Ilbo), that spy satellites has not picked up any activity that is usually associated with a upcoming nuclear test.
Just don’t send Obama to fix the leak. Then again...
"Another possibility--the most disturbing one, actually--is that the North Koreans had been telling the truth when on May 12, just two days before South Korea detected the high levels of xenon, they announced they had created a nuclear fusion reaction, a step necessary to the building of a thermonuclear device. Xenon is released whenever uranium is enriched, such as when it is enriched for the core of a nuclear weapon."
yitbos
I do not think that the North Koreans are technically able to create a hydrogen bomb.I do not think they have the scientists capable for a development of a hydrogen bomb. The leadership can barely feed their people and maintain a 1.2 million man army. Anyways, the South Korean military and the Science ministry would have alerted the public of a threat.
"The release of xenon gas in May throws the conventional view into doubt. . . . doubters need to come up with a plausible explanation why xenon was wafting over the North Korean countryside last month."
yitbos
I think that they had an accident and will not acknowledge it. Nuclear accidents are are usually hidden until revealed by the public.
A new weapon would have the Dear Leader braying like a mule.
Could have come from Japan’s Monju breeder reactor that was restarted on May 6.
We developed the hydrogen bomb within seven years after testing our first atom bomb. The Soviets did it in five. The Norks tested their first bomb four years ago.
Even if these first tests are failures, I think we can safely assume they are not far from having a hydrogen bomb. The basic knowledge is out there.
Perhaps those so called NK "fizzles" were actually just tests of H-Bomb triggers?
yitbos
Xenon-135 is a very good neutron absorber. It is produced as part of the fission reaction.
It will stop a fission reactor if not handled properly. Commercial reactors deal with it all the time. Someone who knows what they are doing has no need to vent Xenon to the atmosphere.
Ruh roh.
I remember back in the eighties, I would ride the bus to work, and buy a Seattle Times to read going in.
There was a small smidgen of an article saying that some stations in Sweden, I think, had detected some higher than usual radiation levels.
Took like two days after that for Russia to admit Chernobyl had blown it’s stack.
Nope. Xenon is released when uranium fuel from a fission reactor is processed to extract plutonium (it is a product of the fission process, and is trapped in the fuel rods until they are dissolved in acid). It's still a sign of bomb-making, but not uranium-based bombs.
The losing North Korean soccer team may well have a new assignment...cleaning up a nuclear leak with buckets and mops.
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