North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un apparently told the media that his country is now ready to set off a hydrogen bomb, aka: H-bomb.
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The country was “ready to detonate a self-reliant A-bomb and H-bomb”, Korean news agency KCNA quoted him as saying.
“Mr Kim made the remarks as he inspected a historical military site in the capital Pyongyang”.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared his country had developed a hydrogen bomb Thursday while touring the Phyongchon Revolutionary Site to commemorate the achievements of North Korea’s former leaders Kim Jong Il and, Kim Il-sung. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has said he will wage war with the United States if necessary.
North Korea carried out underground nuclear tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013 and has been subject to UN Security Council sanctions banning all trade and finance activities that aid its weapons programme.
“We don’t have any information that North Korea has developed an H-bomb”, an intelligence official told Yonhap News.
In June, the State Department said in its annual human rights report that the North’s human rights record “remained among the worst in the world” previous year with public executions, political prison camps, torture and other abuses.
But the claim hasn’t been independently confirmed and has brought on scepticism from experts.
“Do I think they have the capacity to make a hydrogen bomb?”
China is a close ally of desperately poor and reclusive North Korea.
North and South Korea are technically still at war as their 1950-153 war ended in a truce rather than peace treaty.
Zhang Liangui, a North Korea expert based at the China’s Central Party School who once studied at Kim Il Sung University, said he doubted North Korea has the ability to develop a hydrogen bomb.
Analysts have said cash-strapped North Korea might seek the South’s commitment to restart joint tours to its scenic Diamond Mountain resort, which were suspended by Seoul in 2008 following the shooting death of a South Korean tourist there by a North Korean soldier. ‘Their goal could be to pressure the worldwide community.
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“If we struggle in the same spirit with which the workers produced sub-machine guns by their own efforts just after the liberation of the country, when everything was in need, we can further build up our country into a powerful one no enemy dares provoke”, Jong-un said, according to the Chicago Tribune.
