United Nations: The test done by North Korea appears to have been a nuclear detonation, but was fairly small by traditional standards and possibly a failure or a partial success, a media report said on Tuesday quoting federal and private analysts.
The first detonations of aspiring nuclear powers tended to pack destructive power of 10 to 60 kilotons of conventional high explosives, but the strength of North Korean test appears to have been a small fraction of that, the New York Times said.
It appeared to be around a kiloton or less, it quoted scientists monitoring the global arrays of seismometers that detect faint trembles in the earth from distant blasts. The US Geological Survey said it had detected a 4.2 magnitude tremor on the Korean Peninsula, which translates into an explosive force of roughly 1,000 tons.
"It's pretty remarkable that such a small explosion was promptly apparent on seismometers all over the world," said Paul Richards, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.
A senior Bush administration official was quoted as saying that he had learned through Asian contacts that the North Koreans had expected the detonation to have a force of about 4 kilotons.
Philip E Coyle III, a former director of weapons testing at the Pentagon, said the small size of the test signaled possibility of what might be described as a partial success or a partial failure. Perhaps the North Koreans wanted to keep it small, said added. "But if it turns out to be a kiloton or less," Dr Coyle said, "that would suggest that they had hoped for more than that and didn't get it."
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