AMERICAN OFFICIALS AND experts today poured cold water on leader Kim Jong-Un’s suggestion that North Korea has developed a hydrogen bomb.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the Obama administration did have concerns about the “destabilising actions” of the regime, but said available information “calls into serious question” claims that the country has a thermonuclear device.
During a recent inspection tour of a historical military site, Kim mentioned that North Korea was already a “powerful nuclear weapons state ready to detonate self-reliant A-bomb and H-bomb to reliably defend its sovereignty.”
North Korea has already tested three atom bombs, which rely on nuclear fission.
A hydrogen, or thermonuclear, device, on the other hand, uses fusion in a chain reaction that results in a far more powerful explosion.
North Korea has hinted before at the possession of “stronger, more powerful” weapons, but Kim’s remarks were believed to be the first direct reference to an H-bomb.
However, a South Korean intelligence official told the Yonhap news agency Kim’s claim was nothing more than “rhetoric” for domestic consumption.
We don’t have any information that North Korea has developed an H-bomb… and we do not believe that North Korea has the technology to produce an H-bomb.
In September, however, the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security had raised a red flag over what appeared to be a new “hot cell” facility under construction at the North Korea’s main Yongbyon nuclear complex.
Analysts at the think tank said satellite images suggested it could be an isotope separation facility, capable of producing tritium.
Tritium is a key component in the design of more thermonuclear weapons with far greater yields than those made only of plutonium and uranium.
At the time, the institute observed:
Whether North Korea can make nuclear weapons using tritium is unknown although we believe that it remains a technical problem North Korea still needs to solve. Solving this problem would likely require more underground nuclear tests.
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