Both Adam and Origuy have asked me about reports of a tunnel collapse at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site. Between 100 and 200 workers are said to have died. Yonhap News, which I’ve linked, is usually reliable.
After the last nuclear test, which was much bigger than earlier ones, three seismic events were detected from Punggye-ri. This led a group of analysts to posit “tired mountain syndrome,” which is a fancy term for fracturing by the tests, leading to a need for more bracing in tunnel construction and possible damage to existing tunnels. Because it appeared that North Korea had built systems of tunnels for multiple nuclear tests, this could be a severe loss to North Korea’s program.
The tunnel collapse supports this interpretation. The number of people involved suggests that North Korea digs its tunnels largely by hand, rather than with large tunneling machines available in the West. The collapse, said to be in a tunnel under construction, also suggests that North Korea has done little bracing in its tunnels. This would work well enough in hard rock, but the fracturing may make it no longer possible.
A related fear, that the tests might activate a nearby volcano, is unlikely. Compared to natural processes like volcanoes, even hydrogen bombs look small.
North Korea has not tested a missile or a nuclear device for over a month. Problems at Punggye-ri may be the reason. This also may be part of the reason that North Korea has been threatening an atmospheric test.
Major Major Major Major
Thanks Cheryl.
Austin Powers lied to me?
Raoul
Awesomesauce.
Robert Sneddon
Any chance the tunnel collapse has released isotopic traces from previous tests for the sniffers to analyse?
Aleta
I wonder how well they are storing radioactive material. For that matter, their storage of toxic chemicals, or perhaps they’re just dumping.
Yutsano
@Robert Sneddon: Probably too far from the actual testing area to be useful. Not that it wouldn’t keep them from looking…
Cheryl Rofer
@Robert Sneddon: It seems to have been a tunnel under construction, so no test residues. They probably wouldn’t have been building a new tunnel close enough to previous tests to open a pathway. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the sniffer planes were flying and the ground detection stations were keeping an eye on their monitors.
ETA: The best diagnostics are with short-lived isotopes, and it’s a while since the tests, so any isotopes released will probably give ambiguous results.
TenguPhule
Oh joy. //
Big Ole Hound
I’m sure the tunnel was being built by slave labor but just maybe some bigwigs were down there inspecting something.
Mike in NC
Awaiting moronic tweet from you-know-who directed at Little Rocket Man.
Cheryl Rofer
@Mike in NC: He seems to be specializing this morning in moronic tweets about yesterday’s attack in New York. Getting pretty much everything wrong so far.
Jeffro
@Mike in NC: Will be interested to see if Orangemandias tries to claim credit for “making the mountain shake” with his anger and fury at ‘rocket man’
It’s not outside the realm of possibility with this clown.
trollhattan
Pity. Were that it had a similar effect as the Nedelin disaster.
Does such an event cause the release of radioactive particles our sniffers can get at?
Amaranthine RBG
I can’t help but wonder whether the tunnel had a bit of help in collapsing …
raven
@Amaranthine RBG: zactlky
Amir Khalid
@Major Major Major Major:
You were expecting the truth from him?
The Moar You Know
@Amaranthine RBG: You are 100% gold. No matter the subject, the dumbest post on the entire thread will be yours, every damn time, no exceptions.
Amir Khalid
Cheryl, does this kind of hazard in any way hinder North Korea’s nuclear-weapons testing plans?
Origuy
Thanks, Cheryl. Quick response; I asked my question this morning, drove to work, and the answer was waiting for me.
NotMax
Relevant layman-level piece flagged here a couple of weeks ago still worth a look.
Cheryl Rofer
@Amir Khalid: Probably. The three seismic events may have been existing tunnels collapsing. And, as I said up top, this may be part of why North Korea is threatening an atmospheric test, although I think the main motive there is political.
My judgment (and others’) is that they have a basic fission device they can weaponize. They may need more tests to get to a hydrogen bomb they can mount on a missile. But a fission device on Los Angeles, even a small one, would be very upsetting.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So NK in it’s Bond Villain effort managed to wreck a mountain. Is there some wager between Trump and Kim over who can be more pathetically inept?
Cheryl Rofer
@NotMax: There’s a piece about Chinese scientists warning about this that I should have linked up top, too.
Roger Moore
Yes and no. The total magnitude of natural processes is much bigger than even our largest bombs, but that’s largely because they’re usually* spread out over a lot of time. So the energy released by something like a big volcanic eruption is enormously larger than even a big nuke, but its power is less because it’s spread out over days, weeks, or even years rather than coming almost instantaneously the way a nuke does.
I remember trying to work out how much power it takes to raise our local mountain range and being greatly surprised when it turned out to be on the order of a few hundred kilowatts. The key is that while the whole mountain range weighs trillions of tons, it’s rising at less than a centimeter per year, or less than a nanometer per second. So the total power involved is surprisingly small because it takes eons to achieve anything.
*Earthquakes being the most notable exception. They are very powerful because the energy builds up over decades and then is released in a few seconds.
TenguPhule
@Cheryl Rofer:
You have a talent for understatement.
TenguPhule
@Major Major Major Major:
That Swedish pump really did belong to him, you know.
NotMax
Cue FOX in 3… 2… 1…
Uranium Un.
scav
Somehow this, in conjunction to earlier “Trump’s 400-Pound Guy unearthed” combined to produce a peronal “Well, du-uh, Unearthing anything that size should produce subsidence. Moving it too far might be picked up in changes to the earth’s wobble.” Further unhinged speculation about the possible relationship of the 400-lb subsidence provoking an explosion of Mount Orangna is left as an exercise for the reader.
Roger Moore
@Cheryl Rofer:
Especially to those of us living in the area.
Major Major Major Major
@TenguPhule: Are you sure? I heard that sort of thing wasn’t his bag.
stinger
@Mike in NC: That was my first thought too — dreading what that orange glop is going to twat out about this horrific tragedy.
Amaranthine RBG
@The Moar You Know:
Not err’body can be as smaht as you, Friendo.
Chris
@TenguPhule:
She’s not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.
Yutsano
@Chris: “If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here.”
But her emails!!!
Where would they conduct a surface test? Do they have an island in the center of the Pacific or a few thousand square miles of sparsely populated desert tucked away somewhere?
TenguPhule
@But her emails!!!:
I believe it was called Guam.
TenguPhule
@Major Major Major Major:
His book “That is totally my bag, baby” would suggest otherwise.
Cheryl Rofer
@But her emails!!!: They are talking about an integrated missile-nuke test over the Pacific. I think they are saying this for effect as much as anything else, but they often do what they say they are going to do.
Yutsano
@Cheryl Rofer: I am having flashbacks to an anime called Twin Spica (which is cute if a bit slow) and I’ve seen how this turns out if one shoots over a populated area. Failure makes things…not pretty.
Cheryl Rofer
@Yutsano: Yes. A missile test would probably have to go over Japan.
But her emails!!!
@Cheryl Rofer:
Are North Koreans familiar with the concept of Murphy’s Law or do they have an equivalent?
I mean if even if the scenario where the missile detonates on the launch pad fails to materialize, the launch of an armed warhead could serve as a justification for the US to obliterate the few parts of North Korea that are actually lit up at night. How are we supposed to know it isn’t headed to Japan, or Guam, or Hawaii, or LA?
NotMax
Things we don’t and likely will never know.
How deep was the tunnel at the point of collapse?
Was it peripheral to either the test site or the protocol (perhaps a ventilation shaft)?
When did work on it commence (before or after the last test)?
Yutsano
@Cheryl Rofer: A surface missile test site would be visible from the air. Wouldn’t take a couple F-18s more than 30 minutes to get there from Japan. They could destroy just about everything and turn home before the North Koreans could get their kimchi together. I refuse to believe Kim Jong-Un is that stupid.
Matt McIrvin
They could launch a live nuclear missile at Los Angeles and then just detonate it halfway there! I can see no flaw in this plan.
Calouste
@Cheryl Rofer: The empty missiles have already flown over Japan. I’m fairly sure that if North Korea fires a live nuclear missile over Japan, that will be considered an act of war.
Cheryl Rofer
@NotMax: Yeah. I would like to know so much more about the operations at Punggye-ri. Overhead photos can only show so much.
Amir Khalid
@Matt McIrvin:
A nuke detonation, even over empty ocean, could take down a passing airliner, or a ship on the ocean below.
Cheryl Rofer
I would guess that there are observation satellites tasked over North Korea constantly now. Trajectories can be figured out fairly early in the game.
Intercepting missiles is very hard, no matter what Newt Gingrich tells you. Once they are off, they are very likely to reach their targets unless something goes wrong with them.
The discussion I’ve seen indicates that even launching an armed missile over Japan probably does not qualify as an act of war. What Trump will think and do is another question.
Cheryl Rofer
@Yutsano: The question of deterrence is an interesting one. Deterrence is most effective when the response to a particular action is made clear. Trump’s tweets muddy the waters, and his apparent bluster with little to no followup will give Kim motivation to press his luck.
It’s becoming clear from Trump’s actions since he’s been president and earlier statements that his secret sauce for negotiations is to hit the other party with outrageous demands first, strike some kind of deal, and then abrogate it. Pretty much the opposite of how deterrence works.
El Caganer
Wait a minute – the North Fucking Koreans are the biggest threat on this planet? Do what? Who has military forces in damn near every country in the world (hint: not Russia)? Would it really, really kill us to scale back some of our militaristic bullshit?
trollhattan
@But her emails!!!:
“Part A worked, right?”
“Yes, your excellency.”
“Part B worked, yes?”
“Yes, your excellency”
“So if we combine parts A and B, then they work together, yes?”
“Yes,, your excellency.”
“Then let’s combine parts A and B and show them to the world!”
“Right away, your excellency.”
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? I’ll posit they load their fission/fusion thingie into a transport plane and roll it out the back over the Pacific, like a Syrian barrel bomb. Lucky flight crew.
Suzanne
Good Lord. Their soils must be soft as mushy oatmeal. Any chance that we can find ways to exploit that?
Yutsano
You underestimate the will of a petulant man-child with virtually unlimited slave labour at his disposal.
Repatriated
@Suzanne: A fleet of
C-5 GalaxiesDC-10 firefighting tankers airdropping milk and brown sugar?Gravenstone
@But her emails!!!: We’d likely not know the warhead was live prior to such a test. But if they really did do something so stupid, yes the next time another missile was erected on a pad anywhere within NK, I’d be shocked if we (or Japan or China or SK or maybe even Russia) didn’t take immediate conventional offensive action against it.
Waynski
Completely off-topic (I think we need an open thread), HE’S BAAACK:
Doug R
@Cheryl Rofer: Los Angeles? Seattle and Vancouver are about 1000 miles closer :(
Suzanne
@Repatriated: I was thinking more like destabilizing the ground under government/weapons installations or other strategic locations to damage them and reduce their capabilities.
@Yutsano: It is really hard for even very strong men to dig tunnels without mechanical assistance, unless the ground is terrible. And NK prisoners are not fed or treated well, so they don’t have the physical capabilities to do that.
Repatriated
@Suzanne:
So, a really really big spoon then.
Seriously, though, but high risk: countermining with a tunnelling machine, and placing a nuclear mine set to go off when a test blast is detected.
Chyron HR
I don’t see what the big deal is, seems like my wife’s got tired of mountin’ syndrome every damn night.
Suzanne
@Repatriated: Anythingbthat would contribute to erosion or mudslides or that kind of thing might have the capability to damage weapons installations without blowing up a bunch of civilians in Pyongyang.
NotMax
@Suzanne
With just picks and shovels, yes, really tough.
Blasting with dynamite and subsequent clearing by manual labor is pretty old school technology, but effective (see, for example, the trans-continental railroad tunnels).
TenguPhule
@Yutsano:
Please tell you me you’re joking and didn’t seriously mean that.