North Korea says it’s ready to detonate H-bomb?

North Korea is ready to detonate a hydrogen bomb to “defend its sovereignty and the dignity of the nation,” leader Kim Jong Un said Thursday — a threat that remains unsubstantiated. It is the first time the regime, which has already conducted three atomic tests, has claimed to have built a hydrogen bomb. South Korean intelligence specialists were skeptical and dismissed Kim’s words as rhetoric. “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.”

But Kim, while visiting the site of a former munitions factory in central Pyongyang, 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,” according to the official Korean Central News Agency. The site, known in North Korea as the Phyongchon Revolutionary Site, was visited several times by founding president Kim Il Sung, the current leader’s grandfather, and by his father, Kim Jong Il. Kim Il Sung reportedly test-fired a submachine gun at the shooting range at the site soon after the division of the Korean Peninsula in 1945. The site routinely appears in official documentaries about revolutionary history and on North Korea’s military industrial complex, according to Michael Madden, an expert on North Korea’s leadership. A hydrogen bomb can be 1,000 times more powerful than an atomic bomb.

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