North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said his country has successfully miniaturized a thermo-nuclear warhead, as Pyongyang yesterday continued to talk up its nuclear strike capabilities amid rising military tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
While the North has boasted of mastering miniaturization before, this is the first time Kim has directly claimed the breakthrough that experts see as a game-changing step toward a credible North Korean nuclear threat to the US mainland.
His comments came a day after the North Korean National Defence Commission threatened pre-emptive nuclear attacks on South Korea and the US mainland, as Seoul and Washington kicked off large-scale joint military exercises.
Photo: EPA
Military tensions have surged in the region since the North carried out its fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch last month.
The UN Security Council responded by imposing tough new sanctions last week, which Pyongyang has condemned and labeled as part of a US-led conspiracy to bring down Kim’s regime by force.
“The nuclear warheads have been standardized to be fit for ballistic missiles by miniaturizing them,” Kim said during a visit with nuclear technicians that was reported by state media.
“This can be called a true nuclear deterrent,” he was quoted as saying.
Kim also said that the miniaturized warheads were “thermo-nuclear” devices, echoing the North’s claim that the nuclear test it conducted in January was of a more powerful hydrogen bomb.
The North Korean ruling party’s newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, carried a large front-page picture of Kim standing in front of what some experts said would appear to be a sized-down device.
“Obviously we only have the picture to go on, but it looks as you would expect for a compact nuclear warhead,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) in California.
The South Korean Ministry of Defense was skeptical, saying its own assessment was that North Korea had “not yet secured miniaturized nuclear warheads.”
The miniaturization issue is key because, while North Korea is known to have a small stockpile of nuclear weapons, its ability to deliver them accurately to a chosen target on the tip of a ballistic missile has been a subject of heated debate.
Melissa Hanham, another expert on North Korea’s weapons program at MIIS, said Pyongyang’s nuclear scheme had been running long enough, with enough tests, to make it “distinctly possible” that effective miniaturisation had been achieved.
“I don’t know that they could target that missile very well, or what it’s range might be, but the claim cannot be dismissed as bluster,” Hanham said.
There are numerous question marks over the North’s weapons delivery systems, with many experts believing it is years from developing a working ICBM that could strike the continental US.
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