Well, it seems that we finally know what happened with the North Korean nuclear test that fizzled. They apparently mistranslated the Arabic documents the U.S. posted online.
Okay, so neither of those is really very funny. On the one hand, the U.S. posted a whole host of Arabic documents from Iraq that had never been examined before in the vague hope that someone would be able to find evidence that Iraq had a WMD program before we invaded. This was idiotic. It’s equivalent to my posting an entire database of personal information in the hopes that someone online could determine if there were social security numbers in it.
On the other hand, we’ve got a foreign policy failure under this administration that resulted in one of the most unstable countries in the world building a nuclear device. I know that it’s been said that the weapon was a dud, but I haven’t seen any recent analysis on this. Determining destructive yield from seismic data depends on the magnitude of the quake, the depth of the explosion and the matrix it was contained in. Last I heard, the sub-kiloton results were based on hard rock and a magnitude of ~3.8. The USGS says the magnitude was 4.2. If the matrix was softer, this could easily be a 5 kiloton weapon. But then, I’m not a nuclear proliferation expert, so I could easily be missing new data.