Forum… Or Against ’em

By Count Friedrich von Olsen
Does he or doesn’t he? Only his nuclear physicists know for sure…
I have some relaxing things to say. With all this buzz about Kim Jong-un and atomic weaponry/nuclear devices, let’s take a stroll down memory lane and consider how weapons of mass destruction have proliferated since the United States and Britain let the atomic genii out of bottle way back in 1945…
To the best of my understanding, there are ten countries that have successfully detonated nuclear weapons: the United States, Great Britain, what used to be called the Soviet Union and is now known as the the Russian Federation, France, Israel, China, India, South Africa, Pakistan and North Korea. Furthermore, under some sharing arrangements, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine deploy and store some nuclear devices, although, supposedly, some of these have transferred them back to the countries that provided them…
The United States and Great Britain cooperated on the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic weapon and this triggered the compitetive instinct of the Russians, who in 1949 detonated their first atomic bomb. That pushed the Unitied States into creating the supercharged hydrogen bomb. By 1952 the British had built an atomic weapon independent of the ones they worked with us on. The Russians pushed back and they soon had their own hydrogen bomb, which some people call a thermonuclear device. The French, not to be outdone, set to work and were the next to officially build one of these destructive monstrosities, although there is some evidence to suggest that perhaps a year earlier than that the Israelis had achieved a big bang. Feeling hemmed in, China in 1964 responded by joining the club. Ten years later, after a decade of nervously contemplating that its neighbor had the awesome capability, India blasted one off at its testing ground in Pokhran, Rajasthan. That triggered Pakistan to compete…
Ironically, it was a patriotic Pakistani born in India, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who was instrumental in giving Pakistan its nuclear punch. After getting his doctorate in engineering from Leuven University in Belgium in 1972, Khan went to work at the Physics Dynamics Research Laboratory in Amsterdam, where he studied high-strength metals used in the development of centrifuges and was also able to look in on the Urenco Group’s uranium-enrichment plant in Almelo, Netherlands. In time, he was able to create centrifuges to supply enriched uranium to his country. While in the Netherlands, he was also able to very casually walk off with some defective krytrons – cold-cathode gas-filled tubes used as very high-speed switches – that had been thrown away. In Pakistan, he backwards engineered the krytrons, which his countrymen were eventually able to use as nuclear triggers. At the same time, he worked with Khalil Qureshi, a physical chemist, and devised a way to derive military-grade plutonium. You can’t keep a good man down, I say…
So we come to North Korea and Kim Jong-un. Does he or doesn’t he? Have a workable nuclear device, that is. In October 2006, North Korea conducted a nuclear test and claimed it had successfully detonated an explosive device. Our scientists detected something – a bunch of radioactive debris about – but did not know for sure that it was a controllable or even actual bomb. North Korea claimed to have carried out a successful nuclear test in May 2009. In December 2011, following the death of his father, Kim Jong-un, who was then either 29 years old or 27 years old – these North Koreans have a way with being inexact! – became what is essentially the supreme commander of North Korea. In February 2013 North Korea claimed to have conducted another successful test. Kim Jong-un bragged in January 2016 that his country had achieved hydrogen bomb capability. Almost three weeks ago, the North Koreans detonated a device below ground that caused a magnitude 6.1 earthquake, which our scientists believe is consistent with a low-powered thermonuclear detonation…
I told you I could get you to relax…

Leave a Reply