Negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear programme have been a stop-start process, and remains a source of deep concern for the international community. Despite multiple efforts to curtail it, Pyongyang says it has conducted five nuclear tests.
Has North Korea got the bomb?
Technically, yes — North Korea has conducted several tests with nuclear bombs. However, in order to launch a nuclear attack on its neighbours, it needs to be able to make a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on to a missile. North Korea claims it has successfully “miniaturised” nuclear warheads — but this has never been independently verified, and some experts have cast doubt on the claims.
How powerful are its nuclear bombs?
North Korea says it has conducted five successful nuclear tests: in 2006, 2009, 2013 and in January and September 2016. The yield of the bombs appears to have increased. September 2016’s test has indicated a device with an explosive yield of between 10 and 30 kilotonnes — which, if confirmed, would make it the North’s strongest nuclear test ever. The other big question is whether the devices being tested are atomic bombs, or hydrogen bombs, which are more powerful.
Atomic or H-bombs?
H-bombs use fusion — the merging of atoms — to unleash massive amounts of energy, whereas atomic bombs use nuclear fission, or the splitting of atoms. The 2006, 2009 and 2013 tests were all atomic bomb tests. North Korea claimed that its January 2016 test was of a hydrogen bomb, but experts cast doubt on the claim given the size of the explosion registered.
Plutonium or uranium?
Another question is what the starting material for the nuclear tests is. Analysts believe the first two tests used plutonium, but whether the North used plutonium or uranium as the starting material for the 2013 test is unclear. A successful uranium test would mark a significant leap forward in North Korea’s nuclear programme. The North’s plutonium stocks are finite, but if it could enrich uranium it could build up a nuclear stockpile. Plutonium enrichment also has to happen in large, easy-to-spot facilities, whereas uranium enrichment can more easily be carried out in secrecy.
Can it deliver it?
There is no consensus on exactly where North Korea is in terms of miniaturising a nuclear device so that it can be delivered via a missile. In March 2016 Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said the US had not seen North Korea demonstrate an ability to miniaturise a warhead. Two days later Admiral Bill Gortney, the officer responsible for defending US air space, told a Senate panel it was “prudent” to assume that Pyongyang could strike the US, despite the intelligence community giving it “a very low probability of success”. Professor Siegfried Hecker of Stanford University, a highly authoritative voice on North Korea’s weapons’ development, says “we must assume that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has designed and demonstrated nuclear warheads that can be mounted on some of its short-range and perhaps medium-range missiles”. Writing in September 2016, he said Pyongyang’s ability to field an intercontinental ballistic missile fitted with a nuclear warhead capable of reaching the US was “still a long way off — perhaps five to 10 years, but likely doable if the programme is unconstrained”.
Concern in South Korea
North Korea’s nuclear actions have become a cause of concern among its neighbours, especially South Korea. A site in the mountains near Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, is thought to be the North’s main nuclear facility, while the January and September 2016 tests were said to have been carried out at the Punggye-ri site. The Yongbyon site processes spent fuel from power stations and has been the source of plutonium for North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme. Both the US and South Korea have also said that they believe the North has additional sites linked to a uranium-enrichment programme. The country has plentiful reserves of uranium ore.
