Who is supplying them?
As someone who worked with our nuclear detection capabilities, the numbers known are very precise, and they were known at the time of the event.
140 KT is one the smaller scale of a city destroyer if the delivery vehicle is accurate enough. As a comparison the Trident III carries the W-76 a 100 KT weapon. The question is how did the Norks achieve this. Booster fission devices where one places fusion material in the middle of the fission warhead can produce these types of yield. The fusion that occurs releases more neutrons resulting in more “burning” of the fission fuel boosting the power. Another option is the Layered Cake design developed by the Russians. This design employs alternating layers of fission/fusion materials. Or the Norks tested a small true thermonuclear device; the two stage Teller-Ulam design. That type of weapon can be scaled to whatever yield you want.
I find it hard to believe that North Korea is doing this all by itself. I know that Clinton sent them some advanced technology and I would think that China is providing a lot of it. If China can arrange for Norkea to eventually knock out the USA with three or four EMPs perhaps China thinks the Boomer response would not hit Chin. China could then do whatever china wants in the world with only the Moslems as real opposition. Russia would become a tributary state.
Still conventional A-bomb, not a Hydrogen bomb as they claim.
A "hydrogen bomb" has traditionally meant a two-stage weapon - where a fission bomb is used as an X-ray source to compress and cause fusion in the "secondary." Even then, the secondary fusion reaction is really only used as a neutron source for another fission reaction. Most of the explosive yield of a two-stage weapon is from the second fission reaction.
A boosted fission device is basically one that has Hydrogen isotopes - Tritium and Deuterium - present in the pit/core. Under compression and nuclear bombardment as the fission reaction gets under way the isotopes fuse into Helium and free neutrons. These neutrons help "boost" the initial fission chain reaction resulting in a much more energetic fission reaction.
Apparently, if the various Wikipedia articles are to be believed, boosting a fission reaction is relatively simple compared to actually achieving a fission weapon. So there is really no good reason not to boost once you've got a working fission weapon. That takes you from the realm of a couple dozen Kt yield up into the several hundred Kt yield range. Apparently, controlling the amount of Tritium and Deuterium allowed into the pit is how some of our early "dial a yield" weapons worked.
Are they making their own tritium?
140 kt makes a 6.3 erfquake? Color me skeptical.
Lithium 6 or 7?
That has to leave a massive radioactive hole in the ground.
I wonder how big it is.
It was probably Iran conducting nuclear test on NK territory.
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Come on, Google Earth: get with the program and release overflight images made post-test!
38 North purports to see "multiple new landslides" on the lower slopes of Mt. Mantap -- but those were most likely caused by the initial shock.
Bottom line: those lower-slope surface effects don't appear to be any indication of vertical bulk disturbance ("slump-collapse shaft cratering") that would facilitate venting -- directly above the site of the explosion -- deep under the mountain/s peak...
Whatever radioactive materials that were used were measured within seconds of the event. Those little pieces of matter shoot through the earth in every direction.
EVERY country with half a brain measured that explosion. Every country with half a brain knew this information the day of the explosion.
The big question is what to do about it.
If the pictures released by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) are not fake, then the Norks built a 150 KT nuclear bomb similar in class to the W80 warhead used by the cruise missiles carried by the B-52 bomber and the nuclear warhead on the Russian Kh-55 cruise missile and its modern derivatives. A 150 KT nuclear bomb can pretty much flatten the center of any city or when detonated at an altitude of 80 to 100 miles off the ground, create a massive EMP.
Here is the Chinese calculation - 108 kilotons + or - 48 kilotons:
http://seis.ustc.edu.cn/2017/0903/c10094a191087/page.htm
Thanks for posting...Some previous threads had posters indicating the NORKS were using very aged technology.
Question is where are they getting better technology?
What is being done to protect US...hopefully plenty and keeping under wraps.