leaking pen wrote:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,221182,00.html And, less than a kiloton. now, everyone ive heard is saying, wow, thats just a baby nuke. aww, isnt that cute. they blew up a bomb smaller than some CONVENTIAL bombs we have. however, i recall back when the bunker buster nukes were being discussed, and i recall statements that nukes that small were hard to build, control, and set off properly, becuase of critical mass.
The key here may be "control". If they intended it to be a 0.550 KT blast, then perhaps they have demonstrated great control over a process nobody else has mastered.
OTOH if they intended it to be a larger blast and only part of the material fissioned and the rest just splattered around the test site as molten droplets -- which, I suspect, is extremely possible -- then they've demonstrated poor control over a process numerous other countries have already mastered, and they've also shown that they probably can't predict very well what's going to happen when they set one of these off.
i see this as more of a , look, we have control over very very highly advanced technology. if we can do this, we can make nice nukes of larger size as well.
