President Donald Trump said “appeasement will not work” with the “rogue nation” of North Korea, because “they only understand one thing,” after dictator Kim Jong-Un conducted the Communist nation’s sixth and most powerful nuclear bomb test.
According to Japanese officials quoted by CNN, the bomb detonated on Sunday morning produced tremors that were 10 times more powerful than North Korea’s previous nuclear test about a year ago, putting it in the 120-kiloton range. That would make it eight times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
Earlier in the day, pictures of Kim Jong-Un inspecting what was touted as a hydrogen bomb small enough to fit in the warhead of an intercontinental ballistic missile were released by North Korea’s state-run media. Analysts said it was not possible to tell from the photographs if the device was a nuclear bomb with the capabilities claimed by North Korea.
North Korean media accompanied these photographs with a claim that the Kim regime has “succeeded in making a more developed nuke.” After the test detonation several hours later, North Korean news sources said the test was a “perfect success” and represented the final step toward developing a “state nuclear force.”
“The Institute recently succeeded in making a more developed nuke, true to the strategic intention of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) for bringing about a signal turn in nuclear weaponization,” said North Korea’s KCNA news service, referring to the North Korean Nuclear Weapons Institute inspected by Kim on Sunday.
“All components of the H-bomb were 100 percent homemade and all the processes ranging from the production of weapons-grade nuclear materials to precision processing of components and their assembling were indigenously developed, thus enabling the country to produce powerful nuclear weapons as many as it wants,” the report claimed.
The Washington Post quotes Vipin Narang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluding, based on the power of the earth tremors reported around the blast site, that North Korea’s new bomb is a “city buster.”
“Now, with even relatively inaccurate intercontinental ballistic missile technology, they can destroy the better part of a city with this yield,” said Narang.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Kim Jong-Un “specifically cited the possibility of an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, attack.” This has long been a concern of Western analysts because an EMP strike would not require a great deal of accuracy, or the re-entry shielding for the nuclear warhead that North Korea still appears to lack. An EMP blast would be detonated at very high altitude, disrupting electronics within an enormous area of effect.
President Trump responded to the North Korean detonation with a series of Twitter messages early Sunday morning. His posts have been widely interpreted as a threat of military action against North Korea, since he describes the Communist tyranny as a grave threat, dismisses appeasement, and says “they only understand one thing.”
The White House released a statement on Sunday morning detailing that “the president and his national security team will have a meeting to discuss [the North Korea situation] further later today.”
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, disregarding opposition from the international community, has conducted another nuclear test. The Chinese government resolutely opposes and strongly condemns this,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday morning.
The South China Morning Post quotes Zhang Liangui, professor of international strategic research at the Communist Party’s Central Party School, suggesting that North Korea’s latest nuclear test might be too much for China to tolerate, especially since the test seems to have been timed to coincide with a major economic summit attended by President Xi Jinping.
“North Korea makes a bold move every time China has a big event,” Zhang observed. “North Korea has sought to prove that sanctions don’t work and it does not want to go back to the negotiating table any more. Now there are only two choices left: admit that we have failed in our goal of denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula or the US makes a military move.”
South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who ran for office as a “dove” seeking improved relations with North Korea, said through a national security adviser that Seoul will “never allow North Korea to continue advancing its nuclear and missile technologies.” The South Korean military declared it was “fully equipped” to participate in actions against North Korea if necessary.
ABC News reports that U.S. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster spoke with his counterpart in South Korea, Chung Eui-yong, for 20 minutes in an emergency phone call on Sunday. Chung said Seoul and Washington would discuss means of deploying the “strongest security assets” against Pyongyang, but did not elaborate on what that meant.
According to ABC, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is drafting a sanctions package that would completely isolate the North Korean economy in response to the latest nuclear test, which Mnuchin called “completely unacceptable.”
Other world leaders joined in with condemnations, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said North Korean provocations have “reached a new dimension.” She issued a joint statement with French president Emmanuel Macron condemning the test. Macron’s office, in turn, said France, Germany and Italy agreed on the need for a “strong international reaction.”
“It is absolutely unacceptable if North Korea did force another nuclear test, and we must protest strongly,” said Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, after speaking with President Trump by phone. The Japanese government signaled its support for stronger sanctions against Pyongyang.
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