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Comment by burn_and_crash | Hacker News Reader

I have to wonder whether China is involved in any way here. Would they be able to use North Korea as a cover to test their weapons?

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Why would China need North Korea to test its nuclear weapons? They have a long history of nuclear tests and are a member of the club so to speak. They never did the large tests that the Soviet Union or the US did, but I don't see why they would. No one needs a 1+ megaton warhead if you have an accurate delivery system.

It seems suspicious when a D student aces a big test.

It would be outright ludicrous for China to imagine that they could use North Korea to test advanced weaponry without anyone tracing it back to them.

Besides China, there are other sources North Korea can have used to aquiver this technology. Both North Korea, Libya, Iran and China did get help developing nuclear technology from a network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear physicist often regarded as the fonder of the Pakistani nuclear enrichment program.

He again acquired the technology in Europe when working for Urenco, a nuclear fuel company.

The whole Q.A Khan affair is quit a fascinating story actually.

Some more information on http://world.time.com/2011/07/07/a-q-khans-revelations-did-p... and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan

I did also see a very good documentary about this, but I can not find it online right now.

Edit: Here is the BBC documentary about Khans dealings in nuclear secrets: http://www.unewstv.com/6821/bbc-documentary-on-dr-abdul-qade... . Stranger then fiction, it has a plot like a top thriller movie.

I wouldn't be surprised if the nuclear physicist in The Dictator was based on Khan. He sounds like he's proud of his work and I admire that, moral judgements on nuclear weapons aside.

"It seems suspicious when a D student aces a big test."

More like when a D student marks their own test, scores 5% and announces they've passed.

But the current situation is more analogous to a D student getting a D on the big test. Their first nuclear tests were so weak that there was debate over what they even were, and they almost certainly did not represent a successful test of the intended bomb yield. This latest test was pretty definitely nuclear, but if it was a fusion weapon as claimed then it was again a major failure.

I'm not sure if any other nuclear weapons state has had such a string of failures. Both the US and USSR had successful full yields for their tests of their first fission and fusion bombs. China's first fusion weapon test yielded over 3 megatons.

North Korea's test yielded probably under 10 kilotons, and they're going around bragging about an H-bomb. I'd say that deserves a D, at best.

Is China supposed to be the D student? They're the third in class, pissed that they're neither valedictorian nor salutatorian. Definitely not the D student.

And it's not North Korea either, as they're F- students. I still don't understand the big deal here, they fizzle-yielded their first two tests, and their claims of an H-bomb are ridiculous. They don't have the infrastructure, expertise, or materials to make Ulam-Tellers. This is bad propaganda from crackpot murderers.

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