OPINION:
Kim Jong-un, the reclusive leader of North Korea, said the country is ready to detonate a hydrogen bomb to “defend its sovereignty and the dignity of the nation.” Most analysts dismissed the threat as rhetoric. Kim Jong-un made the comments while visiting a former munitions factory in Pyongyang. The site, Phyongchon Revolutionary Site, is significant as the founding North Korean leader routinely visited the site in the late 1940s. It is still used in documentary films about the communist nation.
The Washington Post reports, “We don’t have any information that North Korea has developed an H-bomb,” Yonhap News Agency quoted an unnamed intelligence official as saying. “We do not believe that North Korea, which has not succeeded in miniaturizing nuclear bombs, has the technology to produce an H-bomb.”
“Do I think they have the capacity to make a hydrogen bomb? I think that’s virtually impossible,” said Daniel Pinkston, an expert on North Korea’s nuclear weapons currently at Babes-Bolyai University in Romania.
North Korea has conducted three nuclear tests and analysts believe tunnels are being built for a fourth test in the future. The North Korean military also routinely tests ballistic missile technology and is believed to be able to miniaturize a nuclear warhead for these missiles, allowing it to target American allies in Asia and even the western coast of the United States itself.
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