Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

The New York Times has an interesting article with some analysis into the actual size of the device tested by North Korea Monday. According to their report, the device was around 1 kiloton or one fifteenth the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.

North Korean Test Appears to Be Fairly Small

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: October 9, 2006

The North Korean test appears to have been a nuclear detonation but was fairly small by conventional standards, and possibly a failure or a partial success, federal and private analysts said today.

Throughout history, the first detonations of aspiring nuclear powers have tended to pack the destructive power of 10,000 to 60,000 tons — 10 to 60 kilotons — of conventional high explosives.

But the strength of the North Korean test appears to have been a small fraction of that: around a kiloton or less, according to scientists monitoring the global arrays of seismometers that detect faint trembles in the earth from distant blasts.