North Korea’s Bomb Claims in Doubt

There was a burst of jubilation and pride in North Korea’s capital of Pyongyang, where a TV anchor said Wednesday’s test of a “miniaturized” hydrogen bomb had been a “perfect success” that elevated the country’s “nuclear might to the next level”. North Korea says it was a hydrogen bomb test, though the White House says it doubts the claim. “But what we have succeeded in doing is making North Korea more isolated than before and made the global community more united than ever before”.

The UN Security Council was considering further sanctions against North Korea, which has conducted three previous nuclear tests since 2006 in defiance of UN resolutions.

New Zealand Ambassador Gerard van Bohemen said he hoped there would be new sanctions.

The two leaders also agreed to work to push for new United Nations Security Council sanctions.

Nuclear fusion is the process that occurs in the heart of the sun, and requires huge temperatures to ignite.

China appeared taken aback by North Korea’s decision to conduct a hydrogen bomb test, which caused a minor quake in its border region. Individuals are barred from worldwide travel and the assets of all entities and persons on the blacklist are to be frozen.

South Korea experienced a 5.1 magnitude “artificial” quake around 9PM ET on Tuesday.

The weapons yield was initially estimated at between 6 and 9 kilotonnes, similar to the North’s last nuclear test in 2013.

The US and Japan have sent sniffer planes to analyze the atmosphere off the coast of North Korea.

Even North Korea’s main ally, neighbouring China, says it firmly opposes the test, urging North Korea to commit to denuclearisation.

“If it were a real H-bomb, the Richter scale reading should have been about a hundred times more powerful”, Bennett told AFP.

British Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said the test is another example of Pyongyang’s “reckless challenge to worldwide norms of behavior and the authority of the U.N. Security Council”.

█ China firmly opposes this nuclear bomb test by North Korea…

Count Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the Rand research group is also a skeptic.

“But a regime collapse in Pyongyang leading to mass chaos next door and potentially a united Korean peninsula with Washington extending its influence northward to China s doorstep is downright frightening”. This absolutely can not be tolerated and we strongly condemn this act….

Despite the Security Council’s announcement, the delegate for Russian Federation, a permanent member of the Council, said it would be going “too far” to day that Russian Federation supports more sanctions against North Korea.