North Korea faked nuclear tests to win time and diplomatic position

While world capitals are reeling from the aftershock of North Korea 's nuclear test on Monday, some officials have declared it a fizzle or even a well-planned ruse.

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But experts in detecting atomic explosions say the odds are close to zero that a conventional blast was set off to deceive leaders into believing the isolated maverick state is the latest member of the nuclear club — thereby improving its diplomatic bargaining position and winning face time with Washington's top officials.

It may not be the test they wanted, but there's very little doubt that it happened," says Philip Coyle, a senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information, and the longest-serving director of Operational Test and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Defense.

"The test was about 20 times smaller than the ones carried out by some of the other nuclear powers. But North Korea has a pattern of saying in advance what it intends to do, and then doing it. This appears to be part of the pattern."

U.S. scientists are puzzling over why the blast was such a small one, registering less than one kiloton — a fraction of the 15 kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Some speculate it was a partial failure, as happened with an earlier missile test that flopped into the Sea of Japan, thestar.com reports.

It was clear that something had happened. It was undoubtedly an explosion -- the location was in an area that was not general active seismically, and the indications were that the depth was too shallow to be anything other than a blast. However, almost from the start, it was equally clear that something was just not right. There seemed to be a mismatch between what the North Korean government was reporting, and what instruments on the ground were showing.

After a day of reflection, it seems clear that what happened in North Korea was either a fake, or a failure. Unfortunately for the world, that doesn't matter.

Those first US weapons produced yields equivalent to between 5,000 and 20,000 tons of TNT. That's typical for a "standard" nuclear warhead. In fact, it's easier to produce a blast this size than it is to go much larger or smaller. But the numbers for the North Korea event suggest what would be expected from an explosive yield of about one-twentieth to one-tenth of a kiloton - something about 1/100th the size of the Hiroshima bomb.

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