There is chatter in the nuclear scientist community that North Korea's nuclear test may have been faked. Thus far, no radioactive evidence of an atomic explosion has been detected, putting the test at odds with North Korea's previous one, and with just about every other underground nuclear test ever conducted. The explosion is estimated at 4,000 tons of TNT; assembling that much TNT is difficult, but hardly impossible. Whether the North Koreans could have moved such a stockpile to the nuclear test site unnoticed is another question, but given the national proclivity for building tunnels, and the fact that no one was really looking for the North Koreans to make such a shipment, it's not out of the realm of possibility.
The strategic logic of a faked test would be as follows. Given that the first test failed, North Korean leadership may believe that its nuclear deterrent is insecure. In order to convince the world that it does have nuclear weapons, North Korea could fake a small scale nuclear explosion. Moreover, a faked test is far less costly than either a failed or a successful nuclear test, because it expends none of North Korea's limited plutonium reserve.
There might also be internal reasons to fake a nuclear test. To the extent that the regime derives legitimacy from its strong national security stance, a test demonstrates North Korean prestige. It's also possible that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Some elements of the leadership may have demanded an additional test, while others may view the move as premature given the previous test's failure. This is to say that the engineers and scientists may not yet be confident enough that they can build a workable plutonium device. A faked test, then, could be part of a political struggle.
All of this, obviously, is speculation. But this scenario answers some (although hardly all) of the questions that have emerged about the test, particularly about its small size -- experts have been puzzling about whether the 4 kiloton explosion was a failed attempt at a larger device, or a successful test of an advanced miniaturized warhead. The answer, potentially, could be neither.
--Robert Farley
