At 12:01 AM 9/12/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote:
"No big deal"? Who are they kidding?
JAT, any large explosion will create a mushroom cloud. Its the blast wave reflecting off the ground that lifts the thing, plus the buoyancy of the hot gasses. If it *were* a nuke, it would be easy to detect --from Vera gamma-ray satellites staring at the earth to optical sensors (there's a characteristic nonlinear time-course of optical emissions) to fallout monitors, ground and plane based. Time will tell, and it certainly could have been a nuke (they have the SNMs), but if you do it, you talk about it, much like the Indi/Pakis did. And you can't hide a surface burst, or even a large belowground test --and an underground test that vents to the atmosphere doesn't make such a big cloud. Nukepunk