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-- OriginalOwner_ [tinyurl.com] writes:

Earthquake News Today initially reported [earthquakenewstoday.com] that a 5.1 magnitude event designated 2000aert had occurred near Sungjibaegam, North Korea at a depth of less than 1km at 03:30 UTC September 3.

Their updated report [earthquakenewstoday.com] 2.5 hours later gave a magnitude of 4.1.

All reporting stations were in the USA.

NPR, formerly Nation Public Radio, subsequently reports [npr.org]

North Korea has claimed to have tested a hydrogen bomb

The blast was picked up by seismic stations all over the world, and it was big.

[...]North Korea's previous nuclear tests have been in the tens of kilotons range. That corresponds roughly to a weapon the size of the ones used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. It's believed that the North's earlier tests were of nuclear weapons that use uranium or plutonium (or both) for their explosive yield.

This time, the North claims to have mastered a far more powerful hydrogen weapon [twitlonger.com]. Some early estimates [norsar.no] are putting this test in the hundreds of kiloton range.

[...]Modern nuclear weapons of the sort possessed by the U.S. and Russia are almost all thermonuclear in nature. It allows the weapons to pack a huge punch while fitting in a warhead small enough to be delivered by a missile.

Original Submission