The rumbling started early Wednesday morning when a small earthquake was detected near a known nuclear test site in North Korea. Not long after, North Korean state media broadcast the announcement that the country had successfully tested a small hydrogen bomb. The alarming headlines that followed could mostly be divided into two categories: The North Koreans are delusional and there’s no way they have H-bombs, or we’re all gonna die.
Here are the facts as we now know them: North Korean state media has insisted that the test was of a hydrogen bomb, and monitoring stations around world picked up seismic activity consistent with a small-yield nuclear test coming from an area where the North Koreans have done all their previous nuclear bomb testing.
Based on the available information, the North Koreans may not be entirely full of crap. But they’re not entirely 100 percent above board, either. The issue is that the difference between the two kinds of nuclear weapons — A-bombs and H-bombs, also known as thermonuclear bombs — is highly nuanced.
In the conventional understanding, there are two types of bombs: fission and fusion. Although they have nearly identical (and easily confused) names, they represent almost a 180-degree difference in their approach to blowing stuff up. Fission weapons use a particular isotope of a heavy, sort of unstable chunk or metallic uranium or plutonium. Some sort of trigger is used to kick off a chain reaction that splits each atom of stuff into two smaller atoms, neutrons, and miscellaneous energy. The neutrons smash into other atoms, causing them to split. Basically, the atom-splitting turns into a chain reaction splitting off even more atoms that throws off tons of energy. Fission equals splitting.
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