North Korea announced on Wednesday it had tested a hydrogen bomb for the first time, drawing widespread worldwide condemnation but also skepticism and doubt.
Advertisement
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said the seismic magnitudes of the North’s past tests were 3.7 in 2006, 4.5 in 2009 and 4.9 in 2013.
South Korea blasted anti-North Korea propaganda along its border with the reclusive nation Friday, sending a mixture of K-Pop music, denunciation of the North’s nuclear program and criticism of leader Kim Jong Un.
The propaganda broadcasts coincide with the North Korean leader’s 32nd birthday celebrations.
South Korea has included songs by girl groups in anti-North Korea broadcasts initiated earlier on Friday along the inter-Korean border, sources in the South Korean defense ministry said.
When South Korea briefly resumed propaganda broadcasts in August after an 11-year break, the two Koreas exchanged artillery fire, followed by threats of war.
Although it is not certain North Korea carried out the test as claimed, its actions have been condemned internationally with the United Nations agreeing to draw up new measures against it.
A total of 124 South Korean firms are running factories with about 54,000 North Koreans working at the factory zone, the last remaining symbol of inter-Korean reconciliation, which opened in 2004.
“North Korea acts in a totally irresponsible and provocative way”, he said Friday.
China is the reclusive North’s main economic and diplomatic backer, and the two fought side-by-side during the Korean War.
Despite North Korea’s claims, experts are sceptical that it can make a nuclear weapon small enough to fit on a missile.
The House measure would target banks facilitating North Korea’s nuclear programme and authorise freezing of USA assets of those directly linked to illicit North Korean activities.
“Our analysis… indicates that it’s not consistent with the North Korean claims of a hydrogen bomb test”, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook told reporters in Washington.
The bomb was previously tested by the United States and Russian Federation in 1952 and 1953, the Wall Street Journal said, adding that the United Kingdom, China and France are also believed to have developed this kind of nuclear weapon.
The United States is pressing China to end “business as usual” with its North Korean ally, but in Yanji, 30 km (19 miles) from the border and home to many ethnic Koreans, the mood was one of resigned scepticism. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday urged China, which has been showing increasing frustration at the North’s continued provocations, to take a harder line.
It wasn’t clear what they were doing, but they could be involved in trying to determine what kind of nuclear device North Korea detonated.
Advertisement
The nuclear test “represents a grave challenge to worldwide efforts for nuclear non-proliferation”.
