N. Korean Nuclear Test Could be Tricky to Detect



One critical question is whether North Korea uses uranium or plutonium. North Korea's 2006 and 2009 tests involved plutonium, so a uranium detonation would prove that Kim Jong-Un's regime has opened an additional way to make bombs.

After foreign detection of its 2006 test, North Korea carried out its 2009 explosion deep underground, which gave scientists far less information. Most observers expect North Korea to be even more careful this time.

Some 270 stations and laboratories around the world monitor seismic and other activity under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, making up about 80 percent of the total envisioned under the 1996 U.N. treaty.

EARTHQUAKE DETECTION: Seismic monitoring is the most effective and quickest way to detect a nuclear test. Seismic waves travel about eight kilometers (five miles) per second.


URANIUM OR PLUTONIUM?: Both uranium and plutonium can be used in nuclear weapons. The United States devastated Hiroshima with a uranium bomb and Nagasaki with a plutonium bomb.

North Korea's nuclear program was historically based on plutonium, but the regime disclosed in November 2010 to visiting U.S. scientists that it was operating a uranium enrichment plant.


A successful test with highly enriched uranium would alarm North Korea's adversaries as it is much easier to conceal work with uranium than with plutonium, which requires a reactor to produce the chemical element.


Scientists use instruments that "sniff" fission products of the explosive material and then use modeling to determine the origin of the radionuclides and predict where the nuclear plume may be headed.

Two weeks after the 2006 test, the isotope Xenon-133 was detected across the Pacific Ocean in the northern Canadian city of Yellowknife. But the North Koreans were successful in 2009 in sealing off the test site.






The U.S. Air Force was first tasked in 1947 with monitoring atomic explosions worldwide. Nearly 1,000 personnel work at the Air Force Technical Applications Center, based in Florida near the Kennedy Space Center.


The United States also uses satellites to detect potential nuclear explosions in space or in the atmosphere -- a capacity that is not part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization.


Comments 0