I am working on a series of longer posts related to monitoring the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but wanted to share an amusing paragraph from the March 2009 edition of Science & Technology Review, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s magazine. (I love S&T Review, by the way.)
I sometimes joke that, if the intelligence community detected North Korea preparing to fire a nuclear-armed missile at the United States, the DNI would warn the President that preemption might compromise sources and methods. Furthermore, his analysts would be totally bummed about the radionuclide and weapons effect data they didn’t get to collect.
I kid because I love the IC.
But I’ve never seen the evil-deed-as-intelligence-bonanza phenomenon quite as clearly as I do in this very good article on monitoring clandestine nuclear tests by Katie Walter:
The most recent nuclear test took place on October 9, 2006, when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—North Korea—detonated a nuclear device. USGS and other organizations worldwide focused on analyzing seismic data from the test. Their aim was to quickly find the location—the epicenter, as it were—of the explosion and measure its size.
Livermore seismologists also analyzed data shortly after the magnitude-4 event but with a different purpose. The last nuclear experiments had been conducted eight years earlier in India and Pakistan. The North Korea test offered a rare source of valuable new data recorded at the seismic monitoring stations nearest North Korea, which the team could use to test its regional models and various calibration algorithms.
Only a seismologist could see calibrating a regional monitoring station as the silver lining to a North Korean nuclear test.