By Gordon G. Chang
Little more than a week ago, President Trump claimed North Korea was “starting to respect us.” On Sunday, they claimed to have successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb.
On Sunday afternoon local time, Ri Chun Hee of Korean Central Television announced that North Korea had just detonated a hydrogen bomb capable of being delivered by an intercontinental ballistic missile.
State
media said the device was of “unprecedentedly large power.” The U.S.
Geological Survey said it recorded a 6.3 magnitude earthquake near the
Punggye-ri test site in the mountainous northeastern part of the country
midday Sunday local time. South Korea said the tremor looked man-made
and indicated the device was more powerful than the North’s five
previous nuclear tests.
Fox News initially reported that sources
said the bomb might have been ten times more powerful than the one the
North tested September 9, the most recent previous test. The September 9
device has been estimated to have had a yield of 20 to 30 kilotons,
which is more than twice that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
The apparent detonation follows the release
by Pyongyang’s state media of photographs of Kim Jong Un, the North
Korean leader, inspecting what was said to be an “H-bomb to be loaded
into new ICBM.” There has been no verification of whether the North
Koreans have built such a sophisticated weapon.
Bruce Bechtol of Angelo State University told The Daily Beast it is possible the bomb was in fact thermonuclear.
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Source: The Daily Beast
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