No more secret underground nuclear explosions: new statistical method identifies them 99%
Secret underground nuclear tests could now be a thing of the past thanks to a major scientific breakthrough into ways to identify them.
A team of geologists and statisticians claim to be able to establish with 99% accuracy whether such an explosion took place or not. According to the new study published in Geophysical Journal International, this percentage is up from 82% and is based on a series of known tests in the United States.
In the past, it has been difficult to distinguish between nuclear explosions and other seismic sources, such as natural earthquakes or human-generated surface movements.
“A bomb explodes and it radiates all this energy that can be measured by seismometers,” said lead author Dr Mark Hoggard, of the Australian National University (ANU). “So, the scientific problem becomes how to distinguish between this and a natural earthquake.”
This problem arose seven years ago, when many of the existing methods used to identify underground nuclear explosions failed to establish that North Korea had carried out such a test.
The communist state later confirmed that it had successfully tested a weapon with a force of between 100 and 370 kilotons. For comparison, a 100-kiloton bomb is six times more powerful than the one the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
“Using revised mathematics and more advanced statistical treatment, we were able to improve the classification success rate from 82% to 99% for a set of 140 known explosions in the United States,” said Dr. Hoggard.
Preparation of an underground nuclear test – USA
The team did not use new tools, but improved mathematics, which made it possible to reprocess the data already collected, starting from those collected in the first nuclear tests in the Nevada desert which were, at the time, documented carefully and with great abundance. of data.
By reprocessing this data with new statistical systems, we have arrived at a mathematical tool that allows us, without additional tools and without delays, to evaluate whether there was an atomic explosion, where it took place and how intense it was. Already ex post the topic was able to confirm the carrying out of the North Korean nuclear tests.
North Korea is the only country known to have carried out an underground nuclear test in the 21st century, but satellite imagery revealed last year that Russia, the United States and China have built new facilities at their nuclear test sites in recent years .
Although there is no indication that the three superpowers intend to resume such experiments, the war in Ukraine has made the global security landscape uncertain, so this possibility cannot be completely ruled out, also because the Russian and American arsenals are aging and have need to be reevaluated.
This tool, which took 60 years to reach its complete development, can be used to monitor compliance by the various nations with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty , for those who sign it, or keep an eye on those countries that do not they signed.
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The article No more secret underground nuclear explosions: new statistical method identifies them 99% comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/niente-piu-esplosioni-nucleari-sotterranee-segrete-nuovo-metodo-statistico-le-identifica-al-99/ on Sat, 10 Feb 2024 16:24:29 +0000.