The appeal came after a report said the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s top leader Kim Jong-un had announced that his country is capable of detonating a hydrogen bomb.
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But Kim asserted this week that North Korea had become “a powerful nuclear weapons state ready to detonate self-reliant A-bomb and H-bomb to reliably defend its sovereignty and the dignity of the nation, ” while visiting the site of a former munitions factory in central Pyongyang, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
An expert who spoke to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency responded skeptically.
But White House spokesman Josh Earnest says the information the USA has access to “calls into serious question” those claims.
The totalitarian regime has also claimed to own miniaturized nuclear weapons, but despite Hwang’s statements and North Korea’s underground nuclear tests in previous years, South Korean authorities argue that there isn’t any evidence proving that the northern country has capacity for hydrogen bombs. “I hope various pending issues will be solved one by one”, South Korea’s chief delegate Hwang Boo-Gi told his North Korean counterpart Jon Jong-Su as they shook hands in the morning.
South Korean military and government officials dismissed the claim as rhetoric.
In September, the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) 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.
“The North’s denuclearisation needs to be seen as the ultimate goal of inter-Korea dialogue, not a pre-condition of it”, said Kim Keun-Shik, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.
North Korea completed three increasingly powerful nuclear tests at Punggye-ri in 2006, 2009 and 2013.
Unlike atomic bombs, which employ fission, thermonuclear bombs release power from uncontrolled fusion reactions.
“Tritium would enable nuclear weapons designs that could have a greater explosive yield than weapons made from only plutonium or weapon-grade uranium”, they wrote. The last round of reunions were held in October but South Korea wants to make the meetings more frequent, as there are more than 60,000 South Koreans on the reunion waiting list.
The State Department urged the North to completely give up all of its nuclear weapons and programs.
Analysts have warned that it is only a matter of time until the North develops nuclear-tipped missiles.
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The meeting began at 10.40 a.m. (local time) to discuss various pending issues between Seoul and Pyongyang, Xinhua quoted South Korea’s unification ministry as saying. I think that’s virtually impossible.
