From a reader:
Jonah, I’ve been visiting the sites I normally go to when I want to see the
actual seismic signature of an event, and none of them have the NoKo
explosion up.
That’s very peculiar, because the signature of a nuke explosion is
distinctive – it spikes upward very steeply, then pretty much drops down
again, because all of the energy is released at once. No other kind of
explosion matches that signature. Both the US and Russia had technology to
identify this signature thirty years ago – it was how we tracked each
other’s nuclear testing.
I have to think we knew within a few minutes whether it was nuclear or not,
and the fact that we haven’t announced it means that it suits the government
to be ambigious. What I can’t figure out is whether we’re using that
ambiguity in order to pressure the ChiComs to be useful. It suited them
quite well for NoKo to be a problem for the US, but this has caused a loss
of face, far more than the NoKos keeping the Chinese trains bringing aid. I
don’t think the ChiComs actually care if NoKo has nukes, because it would
let them claim deniability if NoKo hands some to al Qaeda, and the NoKos
surely know that if they really did something to which China objected, China
would wipe them off the face of the earth.