State media indicated Thursday that North Korea has added the hydrogen bomb to its arsenal, a development that, if true, would represent an upgrade to its nuclear weapons capabilities.
Observers in recent years believed that North Korea may have been working toward — but didn’t yet have the capability to produce — a thermonuclear bomb, which can be hundreds of times more powerful than an atomic bomb.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made the claim, according to state media outlet KCNA, while touring a historic weapons industry site in the country.
The reclusive communist country has been turned “into a powerful nuclear weapons state ready to detonate [a] self-reliant A-bomb and H-bomb to reliably defend its sovereignty and the dignity of the nation,” Kim said, according to the KCNA report.
Experts have responded to the claim with skepticism.
John Nilsson-Wright, head of the Asia program at Chatham House, said it was “hard to see convincing technical evidence” of Kim’s claim, which he believed it was the first North Korea had made regarding possessing a hydrogen bomb.
North Korea had previously used plutonium in nuclear tests, one of the elements used in more “small fry” fission weapons such as atomic bombs, Nilsson-Wright said, and a leap to thermonuclear capability would be surprising.
“Since the 1980s there is some evidence to suggest a program of developing highly enriched uranium, alongside plutonium, but it’s hard to see how they could have made the leap from that to evidence of a working hydrogen bomb,” he told CNN.
Lee Chun-geun, a research fellow at the Science and Technology Policy Institute, shared his skepticism.
“It’s hard to regard North Korea as possessing an H-bomb. I think it seems to be developing it,” Lee said, according to a report by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency Thursday.