Quickly moving up the list, North Korea, has earned itself a higher ranking on the scale of world problems with their recent underground nuke test.
What it a boom or a fizzle? We don't know yet; and it's guessed at KT yield is in the funny gray zone that could mean an immature design that's fairly large and inefficient (read: can't stick it on the top of a Nodong missle) or it's a smallish weapon with a fairly efficient yield. Supposedly, they may conduct another test; I hope they do...we really need to make sure we have data on these fools.
What do we know? It probably wasn't a calibration shot. That'd be where you fill a hole with a known quantity of explosives and shoot it so you can measure it against future nuke shots. The United States chose 108 tons of TNT to calibrate; we wouldn't expect North Korea to be too much more or less than this amount because more would be a waste and much less would leave them unable to compare to public data regarding early nuclear explosions.
The first US blast clocked in at 19 KT and the recent North Korea shot is estimated at anywhere from .55 to .80 KT (roughly 5.5 to 8 times the size of the US calibration shot). For comparison sake, the Hiroshima shot was about 15 KT.
The other option would be a fizzle...a nuclear shot that was not efficient enough to sustain the reaction. If so, that tells us a LOT about the state of their program. It can indicate poor construction and design of the initiator explosions, lensing, or poor purity of the fissile material. A fizzle would still make one hell of an underground explosion, but if they were looking to explode a 12 KT weapon and only got .8 KT out of it we'd have less to be concerned with.
If quantity of fissile material isn't a problem, and they claim it isn't; there's no reason not to start with a large device and work your way into efficiency of yield and size, if they truely want to have/use nuclear weapons.
As a comparision, the first tests of nuclear weapons yield is below:
July 16, 1945 - USA - 19KT
August 29, 1949 - USSR - 22KT
October 3, 1952 - UK - 25KT
February 13, 1960 - France - 60KT
October 16, 1964 - China - 22KT
May 18, 1974 - India - 12KT
May 28, 1998 - Pakistan - 9KT
Seems like 10-20 is where you pretty much start at....so why the paltry .8KT? Is it to make us all believe they've started with suitcase bombs?
Regardless, the only military option left on the table at this point is to bomb North Korea until South Korea becomes and island; but that's not very likely.
Oh yeah, and in case nobody is paying any attention...why is it they need to explode a nuclear device when all they're trying to do is produce electricity?
I don't even want to write about this, it makes me so sick and full of rage. First, who the hell would pick on the amish, about ANYTHING. Next, who the hell would welcome the deaths of those innocents?
The westboro baptist church, that's who. I'm not even going to link to it, go google it if you want to read their message of hate. I've heard all I need to already.
I'm so counter to what they say and what they stand for, I've joined the patriotguard.org organization. Seems they were pretty much formed to drown out these westboro wackjobs. I'm all for free speech, but in the end, that has consequences and I see patriotguard as that consequence.
In a testament of the amish...
Enos Miller, the grandfather of the two Miller sisters, was with both of the girls when they died. He was out walking near the schoolhouse before dawn Wednesday — he said he couldn’t sleep — when he was asked by a reporter for WGAL-TV whether he had forgiven the gunman.
“In my heart, yes,” he said, explaining it was “through God’s help.”
I couldn't do that. I just couldn't do it. I don't understand it, but I feel it's something to look up to, to aspire to; but I feel righteous vengance as well.
Google boss warns politicians about Internet power
http://reuters.myway.com/article/20061004/2006-10-04T005304Z_01_L03419567_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-GOOGLE-POLITICIANS-DC.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Imagine being able to check instantly whether or not statements made by politicians were correct. That is the sort of service Google Inc. boss Eric Schmidt believes the Internet will offer within five years.
Politicians have yet to appreciate the impact of the online world, which will also affect the outcome of elections, Schmidt said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.
He predicted that "truth predictor" software would, within five years, "hold politicians to account." People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.
"One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting 'is this true or false.' We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability," he told the newspaper.
Oh sweet Jesus, yes!
If they want this job so damn much, let's see how they like it behing held to account 24/7/365. You heard it here first...someone will come out with an opinion on how this will have "a chilling effect" and it's somehow bad.