The White House poured cold water on leader Kim Jong-Un’s suggestion today that North Korea has developed a hydrogen bomb.
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Russian experts say North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s claim to have produced a hydrogen bomb is likely to be a negotiating ploy rather than a reality.
According to the North Korean state news agency KNCA, Kim made the comments at the Phyongchon Revolutionary Site, a former munitions factory.
“At this point, the information that we have access to calls into serious question those claims, but we take very seriously the risk and the threat that is posed by the North Korean regime in their ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon”, said White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
Because North Korea is so private about its military plans, even in its official news coverage, it is hard to confirm how far along the country truly is in its progress towards developing a nuclear weapons arsenal.
But outside experts remain skeptical that North Korea has the capacity for these kinds of nuclear weapons. But the claim was never completely dismissed.
Elsewhere, North Korea was facing pressure for its allegedly widespread human rights violations.
“The two sides had a broad discussion of pending issues and exchanged views in a honest manner”, a ministry spokesman said.
We all knew that a hydrogen bomb produces a much stronger blast than the atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
Efforts to establish a regular dialogue have tended to falter rapidly after an initial meeting-a reflection of the deep mistrust between two countries that have remained technically at war since the end of the 1950-53 Korean conflict.
The State Department urged the North to completely give up all of its nuclear weapons and programs.
“A staged thermonuclear weapon would seem to be stretch for North Korea”, Lewis told Popular Mechanics, “but after three tests I wouldn’t be surprised to see them experiment with fusion fuels like deuterium or lithium to boost the yield of their bombs”.
South Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Friday began a vice ministerial-level meeting in the DPRK’s border city of Kaesong.
If the hydrogen bomb claim is true, it would indicate advances in the North’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
In 2010, North Korea’s Rodong Simmun newspaper declared that the country had succeeded in nuclear fusion reaction-commonly interpreted to mean hydrogen bombs.
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“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”, ISIS said at the time.
