At 01:12 PM 9/13/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>The discussion on slashdot seemed to center around various siesmograph 
>readings that are open to the public.  Apparently this explosion wasn't 
>big enough to generate much data except very close to the site.  Even a 
>low yield nuke would have created a larger spike in the readings, though 
>this is all complicated by an earthquake in Japan several hours later.
>
>Some wonder if it was a fuel air explosive, but it shouldn't have made a 
>real crater, though from space a huge black spot that may simply be burned 
>land could appear to be a crater.
>
>It takes a lot of effort to create a 2km diameter mushroom cloud without a 
>nuke, but I can't believe someone in the region wouldn't be screaming 
>about radiation if such a signature were found.  Many, many technical 
>universities are in that region which would surely notice a change and 
>would spread in around to other educational and research institutions.
>It's not something that the US, China, Korea, Russia, Japan, etc could 
>keep a secret even if they wanted to, which I can't currently conceive of 
>a reasonable reason to keep this secret, nevermind trying to form a 
>coalition to keep it secret.

Consider this:

http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1997/nd97/nd97albright.html

Apparently a real nuclear test in 1979 and they are still not sure which
country/countries were responsible and where exactly it happened.
But South Africa and/or Israel and/or Taiwan are
suspected. And the fallout effects were minimal and disputable.

>The only nice thing about a nuke is the ratio of the size of the weapon to 
>the size of the explosion.  Perhaps the korean's were detonating it above 
>ground to throw off suspician for an exactly timed underground nuke 
>test.  Perhaps they wanted to see how much ruckus it would create before 
>really testing their nukes.  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...  Is their 
>official response still "mushroom cloud casued by forest fire"?
>Talk about a flash forest fire...

Blasting a mountain for a hydroelectric project, they say. Which doesn't
address the type of explosion, of course, as Marc suggests. I imagine an
atmospheric test would be far less visible seismically than an underground
test.

Prevailing winds are typically from the North-East world-wide in the
Northern hemisphere, so maybe being 20 miles from the sparsely populated
mountainous China border area is not that big a deal.

Best regards,

Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..."            "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com




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