Is there any reason to believe they actually tested an H Bomb? Wouldn't that be a pretty big leap from low-yield atom bombs? It seems like the only evidence it was thermonuclear is that the North Korean government said so, and they're not exactly reliable.

Meanwhile, CNN is proclaiming "N. KOREA TESTS H-BOMB" on their front page, which is a pretty far cry from them claiming to have tested one.

If Jeffrey Lewis says it's "definitely not a successful staged device" (meaning a fission primary and thermonuclear secondary) you can take that to the bank.

https://twitter.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/68457996242311987...

Who is he?

A nuclear weapons expert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Lewis_(nonproliferatio...

Depends, there is a tritium booster, essentially a little bit of tritium in the bomb improves the neutron economy. That could be called an H-Bomb, if we are not too pedantic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosted_fission_weapon

I don't think it's being pedantic at all to use the widely accepted terminology - "H-bomb" has implied staging since the 1950s.

If we were being pedantic we'd never use the term h-bomb - we'd be calling them thermonuclear weapons or Teller-Ulam devices if we're being really pedantic. Half the fusion fuel in a thermonuclear weapon starts out as lithium and half the energy comes from fast fusion neutrons fissioning the depleted uranium shell.

Listen to the audio of the event:

http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265

http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/

For comparison, here is the link to the recent quake off the BC coast. You don't need to be an expert to realize the differences between a bomb and a natural quake.

Natural: http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5169662

Bomb: http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265

Yeah, that sounds like a bomb going off.

indeed, this north korean 'seismic event' is different than other 'normal' seismic events, with exponential dampening.

but is it still a proof of h-bomb? maybe just ordinary (if you could call it so) nuclear bomb test?

CNN front page 5 minutes after you posted this: http://i.imgur.com/JtenBY2.jpg

The colon I guess denotes that what is to the right was said by what is to the left. Perhaps thats a tricky way to say it.

They changed it. When I wrote my post it literally said "N. KOREA TESTS H-BOMB".

Yes, a colon nearly always means "said this..." in journalism headlines.

I had to pull out my AP stylebook since I couldn't find a copy online, but the colon does mean that in headlines -- along with a few other things. Best link I could find below.

[1] http://web.ku.edu/~edit/heads.html

people are saying it's likely that it was a boosted bomb instead (deadly but far far cry from a proper h-bomb)

and cnn is as usual profiting off FUD

The 5.1 earthquake for this bomb would suggest a smaller explosion than the bombs at the tail end of WW2, however that depends on a lot of things. Looking at this list it would suggest about a ~600 ton explosion http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/richter_magnitude_scale

The kiloton-to-richter-scale conversion for a weapons test is highly dependent on the geology and configuration of the test site.

Counterpoint: wikipedia shows a formula that puts it at 44kT[1]. However there is a note that it can vary greatly depending on the fraction of energy that is converted to seismic waves (this formula assumes 0.5%);

That being said, 44kT is still way below what one would expect for a fusion bomb, and low even for a boosted fission bomb.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale#Nuclear...

Here's what 44KT would do to downtown San Francisco:

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=44&lat=37.7564509&lng...

Cool site!

I selected London, England and it immediately centered the blast on the Houses of Parliament. How sentient is that!

Nice to see more options on that one. This is the one I remember: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/gmap/hydesim.html

Not to downplay the seriousness, but that site is quite surprising. I grew up about an hour outside of DC and according to that site, greatly overestimated the danger of a nuclear blast in the nation's capital.

44KT is basically 3 Hiroshimas.

I wonder if they could just wait until a suitable earthquake happens, and then just lie it was a bomb they detonated?

Seismic, acoustic, and, especially, radiation signatures tend to strongly differentiate natural and nuclear device events.

Earthquakes virtually always develop over both time and space -- the "epicenter" of an earthquake is the center or origin of the movement. Some quakes occur over very long rupture zones -- the 2004 Boxing Day quake off the coast of Indonesia involved several hundred km of fault line, and moved along that fault at several hundred km/hr (this is among the reasons why major quakes can be felt over several minutes -- the rupture is literally happening over that duration, and, depending on the location of the observer, the seismic waves have to travel back to them).

An atomic blast begins and ends within a few thousands of a second -- at the seismic scale it's both instantaneous and a point event.

A bomb will vent radioactive fission/fusion products and their decay products, many of which are radioactive, and have signatures specific to the type of weapon and design used. Even underground blasts will typically vent detectable quantities to the surface and atmosphere.

Bombs also do not have any for/aftershocks. Not all quakes do, but it is a tell.

The wave forms are completely different.[1] That's how you can tell it's artificial. Radiation let's you know that that it's a nuke, and not just a pile of TNT.

[1] https://twitter.com/drrocks1982/status/684616925079552000

I think "they" usually look for radiation signatures via satellites (and other signal collection systems).

WC-135 Constant Phoenix

http://theaviationist.com/2013/02/18/wc-135-nuclear-sniffer/

I'll just mention the last bomb N. Korea set off was 9MT, according to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has it listed at about 10ish kT, with higher end estimates up around 40ish. By comparison, the Trinity test during the Second World War was roughly 20 KT.

Were they actually able to produce a 9MT weapon, it would be more than half as strong as the largest weapons test the US ever conducted.

I stand corrected. I went off by several orders of magnitude! :)

Perhaps worth noting that North Korea wouldn't be the first country to bluff that they had exploded an H-bomb when they hadn't - the UK did this with some tests in the 1950s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapple

The Soviets did it too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_4

I think you could argue that the Joe 4 design was an attempt to design a H-bomb using a different approach that turned out to be a dead end - the US was aware of this design but never tested it.

Whereas the UK just plain lied and continues to be evasive about the matter to this day - probably because the exercise was mostly aimed at the US.

The Grapple X on 8 November 1957 (a few months after the Grapple 1 on 15 May 1957) was a successful thermonuclear device[0], so it was only a short term bluff.

Bear in mind that this was in the context of the British feeling betrayed by the Americans on nuclear research - from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Energy_Act_of_1946 :

"Implementing the McMahon Act created a substantial rift between United States and Britain. The new control of 'restricted data' prevented the United States' allies from receiving any information, despite the fact that the British and Canadian governments, before contributing technology and manpower to the Manhattan Project, had made agreements with the United States about the post-war sharing of nuclear technology. Those agreements had been formalized in the 1943 Quebec Agreement. In the case of the United Kingdom, these were developed further in the 1944 Hyde Park Agreement, which was signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapple#Grapple_X

My money: a boosted device. A fission weapon with a drop of liquid hydrogen thrown in to qualify it as "thermonuclear".

It had to be an h-bomb. The korean people have been told that the regime already has nuclear weapons. So any test has to be a marked improvement. The only way up from nuclear is thermonuclear. Whether that H contributed anything meaningful to the force of the blast is very much secondary (pun intended).

> The only way up from nuclear is thermonuclear.

Antimatter. Thankfully we have no idea how to make them yet.

That isn't too far in the future. Using antimatter as a neutron source to prime a fission device is not total fantasy. With sufficient resources it could probably be done today on the bench (ie not a weapon). Such technology would allow for possibly very much smaller and/or more efficient fission weapons.

Antimatter annihilation produces gamma, not neutrons. Priming a pure fusion device seems far more likely.

Every time when North Korea wants to bargain for something, it tests a bomb. Nuclear crisis is the only chip for the DPRK to survive in between the US, Russia and China.

I was under the impression that the whole reason North Korea existed at all was because China wanted it to be there?

As I understand itg North Korea is there because China doesn't want to have to deal with what will happen when North Korea collapses.

I thought the point of North Korea was as a buffer zone so China wouldn't have to share a border with a potentially hostile country like US-friendly South Korea. That may be obsolete, but I'm pretty sure that was the reasoning of the time.

The reasoning of the time was that China was trying to help North Korea conquer South Korea completely. Remember the Korean war was during Mao Zedong's rule of China and he was fully committed to a global Communist revolution. Where others might see a buffer, he would see a staging area for further revolution.

By the the time of Deng, North Korea was well established and successive Chinese leaders have simply tried to maintain the status quo.

If as a nation, you wish to be safe from US invasion/arm-twisting, you must have nuclear weapons. It is the best possible deterrent against US interference. Countries that do not have nuclear weapons must depend on US benevolence - which tends to change from year to year depending on the policies being followed by the US state department and administration.

If Saddam really had nuclear weapons, there would have been no Iraq war and no ISIS today.

On the 'arm-twisting' side, the UK has nuclear weapons but are regularly treated as a US 'bitch'.

Nuclear weapons are far from the only thing that can be used as leverage.

Totally agree with you about the Iraq war and ISIS though.

Perhaps arm-twisting is more effective when the power doing the twisting is known to have used nuclear weapons.

...Except, in this case the power having the arm twisted also has nuclear weapons.

What happens if the rest of the world decides to strike first with e.g. a massive wave of conventional missiles and bombers, combined with a ton of defensive mines air-dropped into the DMZ?

Would it be enough to take out North Korea's nuclear capability and cripple troop encampments on the DMZ enough that they can't immediately launch a massive counterattack on South Korea?

I'm not an expert but according to conventional wisdom, NK has enough conventional-arms firepower (mainly artillery) to do massive damage to Seoul before they're taken out. Looking at a map, it's a bit unnerving how close Seoul is to the internal Korean border.

Does anybody have any idea why is it that way? Considering the obvious threat, why haven't they tried shifting away from there? I agree an entire city can't be moved, bu the "Capital" nature of it can be.

Rhetorical question: what's the biggest potential target in New York State? Albany, or NYC?

You could move the government, but it wouldn't matter. Seoul would still completely dominate South Korea. Their entire economy and around half their population is based in the Seoul metro area. It's only a mild exaggeration to say that Seoul is South Korea.

China would retaliate or threaten to. If, in your scenario, you imagine China would be join in with "rest of world" then your scenario is about as likely/realistic as NK saying "sorry, jk, our bad" and surrendering to US/SK (who, btw, are still at war with NK).

I wonder if we could pay China to do it.

I wonder how much they'd ask.

After the NATO encroachment on Russia, China will not bite.

Can't be sure, but if they wanted to go through with it they would negotiate as hard as they can.

why would you want to do that? Kill innocent civilians because the leader has a hydrogen bomb.

There are better ways to deal with this. Diplomacy ... perhaps

Not saying an attack is the solution, but diplomacy has been tried for decades and hasn't worked at all thus far.

At all? Compared to what? Short of complete capitulation? Why not compare to what was happening before the cease fire?

NK falling is considered terrible by all parties. South Korea can't absorb it. China can't absorb it. It's a hot potato no one wants.

North Korea has a very long history of breaking it's treaty commitments and violating diplomatic agreements.

That said, all-out massive attack isn't viable. there would be no way to disguise the political and military preparations for such an attack, and China wouldn't allow it anyway. Bear in mind the the South Korean capital Seoul is within medium artillery range of the border, and there are a lot of North Korean artillery pieces aimed at it. Even without a nuclear attack capability, North Korea could do them an awful lot of damage in ways that would be difficult to prevent.

The issue, as always, is cost/benefit. N. Korea has always tried to walk the line between wanting to seem strong enough that you can't just toss the leaders out and not so threatening that you actually worry they might mess you or your allies up.

It's not worth it to the U.S. or anyone else to invade, lose 30K-100K soldiers and then have to rebuild the country, and it never has been. The nuclear arms race serves partially as a deterrent against possible invasion, and partially an attempt to get people to the negotiating table for some resources by scaring Japan and N. Korea enough that they want to deal with this.

But if they had the capability, they still don't have the desire to use it as a first strike since that would give every country around + the U.S. a reason to bomb them to the ground.

This was the main idea behind the South African nukes as well. If memory serves, the country had only 6 nuclear warheads, but they were never meant to be anything but a deterrent (and probably a display of power and capability).

Sure it has. North Korea has attacked no-one outside its borders, nor shown any (realistic) intention or even capability to do so.

What definition of "worked" are you using? Serious question.

We're just not talking about the sunken ships and abducted/murdered soldiers around the border?

"Diplomacy hasn't worked" is junk to say but "attacked no-one" isn't right either.

North Korea has done within a rounding error of nothing since the armistice. It's working fine.

I think the road to destabilization would be for the US to give nuclear weapons to South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, and then tell China to deal with it.

Getting Japan to accept them might run into some internal political issues; there's historically been some opposition to nuclear weapons in Japan. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Non-Nuclear_Principles for example.

That said, if Japan decided it _wanted_ nuclear weapons, it can almost certainly produce them itself very quickly (order of 6-12 months according to most estimates I've seen). They have the raw fissile material due to their longstanding nuclear power plant program, and the general knowhow and infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_progra... has some more data.

"Hey friends, because I trust you guys, I prepared this special gift. I hope you guys like it."

"Oooo a present! What is it?"

"It's a T-shirt with a giant logo reading "FUCK YOU CHINA", with a red bullseye painted on the back. Like it?"

South Korea and Japan are already under our nuclear umbrella. It would be a major change in our nonproliferation stance to give weapons out.

Well accept them into NATO and you can give out nukes like candy under the strategic arms sharing clause.

That's the point. I don't want destabilization. But if that's your goal, you can get it pretty quickly without any need for a sneak attack by conventional forces.

I rather doubt that further proliferation of nuclear weapons would do the world any good, either now or in the future

A batch of kindly old grannies with popguns could cripple NK's military capability.

The problem is, they have hundreds (thousands?) of artillery pieces buried in mountain bedrock and pointed at Seoul. Even if we dropped paratroopers on Great Leader's palace and captured him in the first two hours, it is simply not possible to find, let alone knock out, all of the artillery within a few days, which is how long it would take for them to level Seoul.

...If any of them still work. An awful lot of NK's military equipment hasn't been maintained for decades and has rusted solid where it sits. So the artillery could be one big bluff, for all we know. But can we risk it, with South Korea's largest city at stake?

Wonder if Israeli steel dome anti rocket stuff would be effective

Update: apparently I wasn't the only person to think of this: http://www.nknews.org/2014/07/how-israels-iron-dome-could-he...

George Carlin explained this here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMwXR-1oajE

The NK bombs carry the -dong suffix on them, so yeah, he was bang on.

Carlin neglected to make use of the Bush 41 statement "this will not stand" -- how could Carlin miss that opportunity!

When did we stop calling him Junior? There's not even a new actual presidential candidate with the name.

Calling him "Bush 41" makes him sound more like a nu metal band than a former president.

Bush 41 is George H. W. Bush. Junior is Bush 43.

Senior then. I guess my comment serves as evidence for why the numbering is useless for anyone not paying close attention to the sequence of US presidents.

Too many fullstops to correctly parse that sentence. Or is it two? (This is why I like double spaces.)

Surely the first hydrogen bomb was constructed in 1952, not 1958?

Yes, Ivy Mike was in 1952.

depends on the definition of bomb: Ivy Mike was not a weapon, was a nuclear device, as big as a building

The Ivy Mike "Sausage" was big but it didn't fill the entire building - there was a lot of instrumentation for that test. There was actually a weaponized version of the Ivy Mike Sausage planned which was cancelled when they found out how to make "dry" bombs using lithium deuteride.

You can see the Sausage in the pics on the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike

that's the point, was not a weaponized device, does not mean it did not go boom.

I wonder if this would have happened if the US hadn't been meddling so much? For example Bush's "Axis of Evil".

After watching documentaries about North Korea with smuggled film, it would surprise me if the country could have turned out much different than it is now.

The myth of nuclear deterrence is an interesting concept http://setbpbx.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weap...

I don't find the linked document at all convincing. To qualify as 'City Attacks' we would expect that those bombs would have been dropped on the largest population centres available as targets. In fact they were dropped not on the most populous cities, or on the most populous parts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but actually they were dropped on the port and navy facilities at Hroshima and the arms manufacturing facilities in Nagasaki. In fact the second bomb was originally intended to be dropped on the arsenal at Kokura and was switched to Nagasaki due to bad weather. yes they are cities, but they were prioritised on military grounds.

For civilians, we generally think and worry about bombs targeting cities, but most nuclear weapons are actually aimed at military targets. The primary targets are the enemy's own nuclear weapons, military assets and infrastructure come second and population centres last of all. The point of nuclear deference isn't that if we have a war mum and dad will be killed, it's that everyone will be killed.

The fact is we have vast amounts of direct testimony from US and Russian military personnel and leaders, both at the time and in subsequent interviews books and testimony, that deterrence was the primary consideration in their defensive and offensive planning.

>The primary targets are the enemy's own nuclear weapons, military assets and infrastructure come second and population centres last of all.

Humbug:

"“The authors developed a plan for the ‘systematic destruction’ of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted ‘population’ in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin and Warsaw,” Burr pointed out. “Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se (as opposed to military installations with civilians nearby).”

But other contemporary sources make it abundantly clear the Pentagon saw any person tied to a war effort as a viable military target. A now declassified 1952 U.S. Navy film on chemical and biological warfare specifically states a goal “to incapacitate the enemy’s armed forces and that portion of his human population that directly supports them.” With similar thoughts in mind, the U.S. Army had looked into radiological warfare and built deadly dirty bombs."

(http://warisboring.com/articles/this-cold-war-study-is-a-cat...)

Civilians have always been targets and always will be.

Of course they are, and “Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day" is complete and utter guff. This was immediately after the systematic, thorough going population centre bombing campaigns of WW II. Which planet are these people from?

nevertheless the fact remains that most nuclear weapons are tactical or mid-range and therefore not primarily suitable for population attack. The primary reason Russian tank divisions didn't swoop through Germany in the 1950s wasn't because atom bombs would rain down on Moscow (although they would) it was because atom bombs would rain down on the tank divisions.

What is the significance of the depth being reported as 10km?

Is that some sort of minimum for a quake, or did they dig down 10,000m to fire this thing off? That seems rather deep even for a large bomb, which this wasn't.

Initial reports had it at 10km deep -- which would've been far too deep for a bomb test -- they've since been revised to 0km deep, which is what you'd expect for a test beneath the surface.

The 10km was interesting since if it held up, it would have likely ruled out a test, but it turns out that the first readings were wrong.

Wouldn't this cause some kind of an earthquake that's detectable?

Yes, USGS has detected it. The question is whether it was a nuke or conventional explosive or something else.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us10004bnm#...

It has been detected as a 5.1

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/05/asia/north-korea-seismic-event...

It might even cause a news organization to write the first two sentences of its article about that.

Imagine a world where every country has nuclear weapons and methods of their delivery - a true democracy, or a diversity of democracies you could say.

Maybe they should focus their efforts on getting their food production going so their people don't starve to death. Just sayin'...

You don't run a totalitarian regime in the interests of your people.

Its profitable to be a kingpin in the NK chain of command. Its what the dick waving of nuclear arms is - look, we have a bomb, give us more free shit.

And it isn't even the threat of war. Its a threat of jumping the shark so they have to be conquered, leaving the region with 25 million destitute refugees to somehow deal with. Just for comparison, the EU is having huge trouble dealing with 11 million Syrian refugees and only 4 million have fled the country.

Not for long.

Any time discussion of the DPRK comes up, I inevitably see many people repeating blatant lies about the country.

http://anti-imperialism.com/2014/08/14/western-dprk-propagan...

There is plenty of propaganda, sure. However that doesn't mean NK isn't a state dangerous to the world in which you and I live.

Good for North Korea!

It's important that there be Mutually Assured Destruction between North Korea the imperialist US-backed South Korea.

We have nuclear weapons. Who are we to say that North Korea shouldn't have them? That just wouldn't be fair.

Me. I'll say it.

Any regime which systemstically implements slave labor, mass starvation, and utter lack of human rights should not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

We do not want mutually assured destruction, especially with a nation controlled by a non-rational actor. The principle won't operate.

Unfortunately, it is now too late. North Korea has a fusion bomb. Once second closer on the doomsday clock.

Agree with what you said and I'll underscore the 'especially' clause of your point regarding rational actors. I encourage people to watch Errol Morris' Fog of War which examines the life of Robert McNamara. In the documentary he states that a principle lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is that "rationality will not save us".

Rational actors believing they are proceeding in the best interests of their countries can allow a situation to escalate and cause the mutual annihilation of their civilizations. This was the case when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were heads of their respective states.

No one should have these weapons.

> No one should have these weapons.

But North Korea not having them is so much more important that even mentioning other countries in the same discussion is ludicrous.

Who knows? They are just talking big - it's even more ludicrous for the only nation who ever used nuclear weapon on civilian population to still have them, am I rite?

Do you truly believe that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, or Imperial Japan would have hesitated for a second to use nuclear weapons if they had developed them first?

I, for one, do not.

---

Sidenote:

The most remarkable aspect of the story of the atomic bomb occurred after the development of fusion weapons.

The President and his chief advisors called together a committee to determine whether to wipe out the Soviet Union. The discussion took place in the Roosevelt Room shortly following the development of the hydrogen bomb.

With its massive bomber fleet, unparalleled fusion technology, and large stockpile of fission weapons, the United States could have quite literally conquered the world.

Yet it chose not to do so. I know of no parallel in world history where such an event has occurred.

Prior to the conference, Hans Bethe of the Manhattan project wrote to the President:

"If we fight a war and win it with nuclear weapons, what history will remember is not the ideas we were fighting for, but the methods we used to accomplish them.

These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan, who brutally killed every last inhabitant of Persia."

The russians, which are not that different from URSS, if you ask me, have nuclear missiles. They haven't used them in Syria, or any other conflict that I'm aware of. They are stupid enough to have detonated the worlds largest nuclear weapon, I'll give them that (Tsar bomb).

But not on other humans. On a deserted island. We like to vilify the russians, sure we do - but when you look at the facts as they are, a very different picture comes to your eyes. Don't let those manipulative news stories fool you.

Read the history of Stalin's reaction to being told of the bomb at Yalta. He encouraged its immediate use against the Japanese Empire.

"If we fight a war and win it with nuclear weapons, what history will remember is not the ideas we were fighting for, but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan, who brutally killed every last inhabitant of Persia."

I like this quote. What I like even more, is how just above it, you smudge the history as if they not detonated nuclear weapon on people, but they just refrained from conquering the world. Read what I said the same thread - in the end, what matter is what you actually do, not what you could have done, or what you claimed you would do.

I refer you back to my previous comment about the other regimes, and their propensity to use atomic weapons, had they developed them first.

Hell, Stalin told Truman to use it on Imperial Japan as soon as possible.

I've read the comment. Unfortunately, I lack the motivation right now to read history books, but leaving that aside, a good start would be the USA themselves to lead the way, and get rid of those weapons. Like South Africa did. We cannot plead ignorance anymore, we know they are horrible weapons by now (though, the military might call that "effective").

I know there is a plan, by which they reduce the ammount of nuclear warheads, but to me it seems like they are dragging their feets, looking suspicious on one another. Have they wished it, they would be long gone, serving as fuel in some reactor.

Getting back to North Korea - I don't think something can be done without causing a major conflict. Leaving them be is not safe either, but there must be a peaceful way. If the problem is that Kim Jong-un is paranoid and crazy - he'll die eventually, and if not provoked, I hope things go smooth.

A lot of the world revolves around trust - even if blind, stupid trust. A crazy enough guy could poison the bread in the supermaket, and there's not much one can do about it. I think this is somewhat similar.

Also, I think much of the panick arise from the fact that they don't play along with "the great american plan", like many other countries do. They are torn in their side, but so far not such a big threat.

By the great american plan I mean sharing the same system of government, signing good' ol' threaties that favor american corporations (TPP, PIPA, SOPA, and whatnot). They did a great job spreading democracy in middle east, while mostly Europe ended up taking the heat. I hope they won't start spreading democracy there as well, because pushing it by force didn't seem very effective.

> am I rite?

No you are not. You are being simplistic and trying to make a point with meaningless platitudes.

Intellectual "shortcuts" like that will not lead you to any sort of understanding.

If my comment was meaningless platitudes, what can I make of yours?

My arguments was that it doesn't matter what one is claiming - in the end what matters is what you do. The americans are the only ones so far to have nuked other people, and they still get to keep their missiles. Don't you think we are way too forgiving with them?

> in the end what matters is what you do.

And Americans have lots of bombs and don't use them. North Korea on the other hand tortures people routinely for fun (not for intelligence or other excuses, but literally for fun).

> The americans are the only ones so far to have nuked other people

They did that on the dawn of the Nuclear era when no one understood the impact or nuclear weapons. After the first two they understood things better - any not only never used them again, but worked to make sure no one else would either.

> Don't you think we are way too forgiving with them?

Not in the slightest.

Conversely nuclear weapons are probably the most significant reason the US and USSR never had a direct military conflict in Europe.

Absent the risk of escalation, I find it unlikely that the various crises wouldn't have escalated too, at least, the take over of west Berlin (and thus probably a subsequent land war in west Germany).

I would go further and say "nobody should have a nuclear weapon". We only have the one planet.

Can we hurry up and create strong AI already, before someone gets everyone killed?

EDIT: Somehow I didn't expect that offhand ha-ha-only-serious comment to kick off a massive discussion about the capabilities of AI. Fun, but not my intention.

I kind of get the idea of what you are trying to say, but actually reading your post reads like a bunch of non-sequiturs.

North Korea not having a nuclear weapon is so much more important than nobody having one, that the two discussions have virtually nothing to do with each other.

It's not one is just a slightly greater degree than the other, they are so different they are not even in the same ballpark.

And what does having just one planet have at all to do with nuclear weapons? I'm not seeing the connection. All the nuclear bombs on earth would do nothing whatsoever to the planet, and barely anything to the inhabitants except for a minority of them.

And then the sudden jump to strong AI? Hu? That came out of nowhere.

You imply that strong AI has some sort of connection to "everyone killed", first of all, how exactly would everyone get killed anyway? Humans don't have the ability to do that, not today.

And strong AI would, if anything, make it easier to do that, not harder.

So your post really is quite perplexing if you actually read it.

There are definitely enough nuclear bombs to wipe out a large fraction of earth's population, if not all. The US alone has a few thousand.

Not to mention that nuclear winter is a very real (though unproven) concern.

> There are definitely enough nuclear bombs to wipe out a large fraction of earth's population, if not all.

No, that is simply not true. Not in the slightest.

Well i am happy to be proven wrong. Do you have a source/argument?

Nuclear weapons aren't primarily a threat to the planet, they're a threat to densely populated cities.

Five countries detonated 2,000 nukes over 35 years. You could simultaneously set off every existing nuclear warhead inside of Wyoming and it would have a negligible health impact on most of the rest of humanity. You couldn't come even remotely close to killing everyone with nukes, unless the global arsenals were vastly expanded; the US alone has 27,000 cities. Russia's entire stockpile could kill at worst 1/3 of all Americans, assuming they all worked properly and hit their targets. The notion that nuclear war could end the human race, is entirely a myth (which is not to downplay the actual damage such would cause).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter suggests more widespread effects as at least a plausible scenario, though not by any means a certain one.

That aside, widespread radiation would ruin significantly larger areas (nuclear test sites intentionally avoid areas and conditions that would allow the spread of fallout, whereas bombardment would not); destruction of numerous functions of society and common services would kill many more.

Whether some subset of humanity would survive or not, this at the very least seems like a scenario well worth preventing.

The idea of nuclear winter is a myth? Large volcanic eruptions have thrown up enough material that stayed aloft long enough to have significant climate effects. Krakatoa had the yield of about 4 Tsar Bombas and affected the global climate significantly for ~5 years. The worldwide nuclear stockpile is significantly larger. I guess it depends on how that is detonated, though, airburst vs. under material to be tossed up.

Then what's with the "enough nukes to destroy the world x times over" numbers I remember hearing? Have we really disarmed that much? Or were the numbers exaggerated?

Nuclear war would severely harm the nations hit. Russia as a nation for example would all but cease to exist, as their population is extremely tightly clustered in the west; the US by comparison is far more spread out (Russia would have to hit every single US city that they could, in order of population, and that still wouldn't destroy the US, but it would clear out their entire arsenal on just part of one nation).

The desire has always been to make sure everyone is properly afraid of a nuclear war, because of the destruction it would indeed cause. It's desirable for it to be considered off the table entirely, a true last resort response. There is a large gulf between an outcome that destroys all of the relevant cities in the US and ending the human race. The 'mistake' is an intentional over-estimation of how much destruction the whole can cause (Why? To properly cause immense fear, so global nuclear war is thought of as a humanity ending event; and that's probably sane reasoning). Back in reality, only a few nations would be heavily destroyed, and the amount of radiation most of the rest of countries would absorb wouldn't matter in regards to survival.

Some will claim it would cause nuclear winter, destroy the global food and fresh water supply etc. It wouldn't come close to causing that. Nearly the entire planet would remain fundamentally just fine (the nukes would be focused on urban areas anyway). We know for a fact that large numbers of nuclear detonations (eg 178 in 1962) don't just magically spread globally and start killing everyone via destroying the food supply or other similar mass outcome events. Specific small areas of the planet would not be fine of course, they would be completely destroyed. An extremely small percentage of arable land could be destroyed, even if it was specifically targeted. Within less than a century you'd never know a global nuclear war occurred as far as obvious signs in nature are concerned, outside of the specific areas that were hit.

That number was based on a silly division that went something like this: nb bombs (~20k) x average yield (~ 200 kT TNT) / nb people ( ~ 4 bn at the time) = 1 ton of TNT per person, which is enough to kill you about 100 or 1000 times, pick a number.

The numbers were exaggerated. Even at the peak we never had the ability to kill anything but a fraction of the humans on earth.

But they could be the end of civilization. And we just don't have enough resources to rebuild from scratch.

Take out the big university cities, big finance cities, some semiconductor manufacturers and some ports and we back into victorian era.

For anyone interested in this idea, read "The Evitable Confict", the last short story in "I, robot", written by Asimov.

How is that gonna help?

Presuming we get its value function correct: any number of things that will have the net effect of no one ever dying again, and by extension no one having the capability to harm others, in addition to immediately eliminating almost every existential risk to humanity as a whole. The least imaginative possibility I can think of involves switching everyday reality over from physical matter to computation; no matter what happens in that computation, the sentient beings interacting with it cannot be harmed.

Many of the folks thinking about and working on solutions to existential risk consider AI pretty much the universal solution (and, at the same time, consider unfriendly AI one of the notable existential threats).

Wait, so the same people you think are unable to handle nuclear weapons, you would assume they would program the AI the way you want?

What makes you think that would happen?

Be logically consistent please, either people will not set off nukes, and also program AI "correctly".

Or they will set off nukes and program AI "wrong".

In either case AI has nothing to do with safety from nukes.

Strong AI is not a God, it does not have the ability to do the things you are imagining. Among other problems, what makes you think those things are even possible in the first place? No matter how good the AI, it still has to follow the laws of physics.

> Wait, so the same people you think are unable to handle nuclear weapons, you would assume they would program the AI the way you want?

I certainly hope the set of people with access to nuclear weapons would not be the same people building AI, or we'd indeed be quite screwed.

> In either case AI has nothing to do with safety from nukes.

> Strong AI is not a God, it does not have the ability to do the things you are imagining. Among other problems, what makes you think those things are even possible in the first place? No matter how good the AI, it still has to follow the laws of physics.

The laws of physics would govern the computational substrate on which everything else runs; what runs on that substrate can emulate anything it likes. The major assumption I'm making is that we can successfully build strong AI (AI capable of self-improvement past human), which seems plausible but not a given.

> I certainly hope the set of people with access to nuclear weapons would not be the same people building AI, or we'd indeed be quite screwed.

Well, in fact they are, (or would be) the exact same people. But despite that we won't be "screwed".

Or did you think that if strong AI showed up the Governments of the whole world would not rush to have their own?

> what runs on that substrate can emulate anything it likes.

At what speed though? It's not clear that an emulation in a computer would be anywhere near as fast as the actual thing (i.e. a human), so it might not actually be possible to upload people digitally. (If nothing else, the speed of light limits how fast you can run a CPU.) It's also not so obvious that it's even possible to copy a brain, never mind running one.

All your assumptions are predicated on the ability to emulate a human in software, if that's not possible then none of what you wrote about strong AI will happen, instead people will continue to be people and AI will just be another thing to ignore just like we ignore all the marvels we have now.

> The major assumption I'm making is that we can successfully build strong AI (AI capable of self-improvement past human), which seems plausible but not a given.

An even larger assumption is that it's even possible to do that. Never mind can we. Can an intelligence program something smarter than itself? I don't think so. I don't think the AI can, I don't think humans can.

So far the only known method of making a smarter version of something is by random permutation and picking the best one. It's not an accident that all AI used today is by that method. I'm not aware of any that are programmed from first principles.

> Or did you think that if strong AI showed up the Governments of the whole world would not rush to have their own?

Governments can't "rush" on the same scale an AI can, and a strong AI with an appropriate value function wouldn't permit the existence of any other strong AI that doesn't share its value function (since such an AI would fall somewhere between "counterproductive" and "potential existential threat"), nor would "of their own" have any meaning unless that value function was hopelessly broken.

There shouldn't be a "second" strong AI, only a first.

> It's not clear that an emulation in a computer would be anywhere near as fast as the actual thing

Humans operate relatively slowly on the scale of computers; we're just massively parallel and have a fundamentally different architecture. That's not at all insurmountable even for human-built technology, let alone technology-built technology.

> All your assumptions are predicated on the ability to emulate a human in software

Several of my assumptions are, true, though I can imagine other possibilities that would have similar effect.

> An even larger assumption is that it's even possible to do that.

That's not a larger assumption, that's the same assumption I stated.

> Can an intelligence program something smarter than itself? I don't think so.

On what basis?

> I don't think humans can.

Humans don't have to build a system smarter than ourselves, just build one as smart as ourselves and run it a lot faster with access to a lot more data.

Your false dichotomy ignores, "people will eventually set off nukes, but can write a program that helps them reason better, which helps write a better reasoning program, which helps build a thinking program, which helps build AI that is smarter than most people, which builds an AI smarter than itself, all the while refining our innate human belief and value systems into clearly codified rules which the AI is kind enough to abide by."

It's not a dichotomy (which is an "either this or that"), it's a both. Both options can happen, and so can yours.

Or in other words AI has nothing to do with nukes since what AI does has no bearing on if nukes will be set off.

That seems like a bit of a stretch.

Who's to say strong AI will even be significantly smarter than us anyway? What if humans are almost as smart (obviously there's some room for improvement) as it's physically possible to be? Truth be told we really don't know that much about consciousness or intelligence.

> Who's to say strong AI will even be significantly smarter than us anyway?

By definition of strong AI: AI capable of self-improvement past human levels; the assumption in my post is that it's possible to build strong AI.

> What if humans are almost as smart (obviously there's some room for improvement) as it's physically possible to be? Truth be told we really don't know that much about consciousness or intelligence.

We don't know that much, but we know enough to make reasonable predictions, and from all the available information, it seems rather exceedingly unlikely that humanity is the ultimate unsurpassable plateau of sapient thought. We have approximately zero evidence to support a hypothesis that humanity is anywhere near the physical limits on the capabilities of a mind, and plenty of evidence to support the hypothesis that we're not even close.

Because computers will somehow be more noble than human beings.

Wait, that doesn't make sense.

Unfortunately, if that happened, I'm pretty sure the only possible endgame is a scorched sky and humans as living batteries.

Science fiction movies are not even remotely a useful model of the outcome of either friendly or unfriendly AI. Skynet or the Matrix are not even close to how bad or how fast an unfriendly AI would be, given that the protagonists of those movies have even the slightest hope. And conversely, no science fiction movie I've ever seen provides any useful depiction of friendly AI; we're not talking about Jarvis or Data here.

I'll admit that I'm a complete novice on this subject but I think Transcendence did a halfway decent job of showing some possible applications of friendly AI. That said, I don't think I'd constitute the conflation of any human mind and supercomputing as friendly.

> I think Transcendence did a halfway decent job of showing some possible applications of friendly AI.

Interesting, I hadn't seen that one. While that doesn't give a very good impression of what the timescale could be (though it actually seems fairly plausible for an uploaded human that just runs faster with more data but doesn't attempt iterative self-improvement), it does suggest at least some possibilities in ways I haven't seen in other movies, and in relatively few short stories.

> That said, I don't think I'd constitute the conflation of any human mind and supercomputing as friendly.

"Friendly AI" is a specific term of art, referring to AI that values sentient beings, and whose value function involves modeling and satisfying the value functions of sentient beings. (Its opposite, "unfriendly AI", refers to any AI that doesn't value sentient beings; that doesn't just mean "actively hostile", but also simply "doesn't explicitly care", either one of which would create an existential threat. For instance, a paperclip-building AI that sees people as another source of matter that isn't paperclips yet.)

Almost all sentient beings tend to hold their own continued existence in high value.

My concerns in regard to fusing human and machine aren't necessarily because I question the supportive nature of humanity. It's more so that there is no telling what a brain would do with that much power. It's not implausible to say that such a being might disassociate with the human race altogether. Furthermore, innate urges such as survival and production of offspring would still be strongly intact, probably much more prevalent than any idealistic thoughts floating around in the frontal lobe, hence posing a threat of the classic "robot takeover."

Comparatively, teaching/programming a system to have morality seems like a safer bet than giving the reins to a being whose psyche was sculpted by evolution.

I'd certainly agree that we wouldn't want the the most powerful system in the world to have originated as an uploaded human with all their cognitive biases and undocumented value functions, as opposed to an intentionally designed system.

I'm sorry; it was a joke.

Because living batteries are clearly absurd.

The old doomsday clock was about the USSR and US having arsenals of thousands of nuclear missiles to render the world inhospitable if they ever declared open war.

North Korea could probably kill a sizable chunk of the 25 million people living in the metro area of Seoul, but would otherwise not be able to inflict harm on the US, at least not yet. And we would be their nuclear retaliator if they attacked anyone - we know all their military bases, and a nuclear attack on South Korea would see instant retaliation upon all their installations.

While China does not want to deal with the refugee crisis that would result from a post-NK scenario, they would definitely never fight the US directly because they know full well that doomsday scenario would play out in nuclear war with the US.

You underestimate the ability of international events to quickly spiral out of control.

This is an n-body problem, and one of those particles is a borderline insane government.

Here's a North Korean prison camp survivor's testimony from 2003. Try to read it without vomiting. This is the country you think should have nuclear weapons: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3071464/ns/us_news-only/t/survivor...

Chang In-suk [1], head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association in Seoul at the time, says Lee Soon-ok is a liar. The Guardian tackles the question, "Why do North Korean defector testimonies so often fall apart?" [2]

[1] http://uskoreainstitute.org/research/visiting-scholars/past-...

[2]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-ko...

Interesting. Do you have any information on what was suspected to be exaggerated? I read up a bit on Chang In-suk, and saw the Guardian's reference to forum posters on NKnet (who doubted she was imprisoned), but couldn't find any of the original posts or supporting evidence.

This sort of stuff would be really really bad to fabricate IMO, considering the scale of known-true suffering going on in North Korea.

Wow. Thanks for posting, I had no idea about any of that. I mean, I knew NK was a serious human rights offender, but when hearing specifics really hit home how bad it is. Atrocious.

Erm, "Mutually Assured Destruction" sort of requires the destruction to be assured mutually, by definition.

There's no way they can destroy America. In the most lucky(??) case, they might be able to destroy a city or two before getting wiped out.

I doubt they could destroy even South Korea. (Sure, they can kill millions, but South Korea is kinda democratic enough to survive that, and you can bet my ass that the North Korean regime will be wiped out.)

South Korea is pretty much Seoul and NK can flatten (in theory) it with unguided rockets, Seoul is 30 or so miles of the border this is within range of even some field howitzers with RAP shells.

Shouldn't they work on getting electricity first?

http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/12/18/n...

You would think. But I suspect the few people that have the power to make use of the nation's resources have all the electricity they need.

Since they simply take what they want from the rest of the populous, the desires of the rest of the people simply don't matter enough.

Is it really mutual destruction if North Korea has nothing to lose ?

The leaders still can lose their lives. Which is pretty much what they care about.

Hm. Wouldn't have expected NK internet propagandists to be paying attention to Hacker News.