Tag: nuclear test

The dismantling of the nuclear test site in North Korea is not a significant measure because it is easily reversible.  The Kim regime at a time of their choosing can easily go and drill more shafts into another mountain if they want to do more nuclear testing.  This is just another example of how the Kim regime tries to give up little to nothing in return for aid and the dropping of sanctions:

North Korea on Sunday stressed the importance of its dismantling the Punggye-ri nuclear test site this week and called it a “significant measure” amid reports the North has disregarded South Korea’s roster of journalists planning to cover the dismantlement.

The decommissioning of the site is “a very meaningful and significant measure” undertaken voluntarily by the North to achieve the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula based on the spirit of an agreement reached at a historic inter-Korean summit, North Korea’s propaganda website DPRK Today said.

DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name. The leaders of the two Koreas met on April 27 at the truce village of Panmujom on the inter-Korean border.

DPRK Today referred to the May 12 announcement by the North’s foreign ministry that it will hold a ceremony for the dismantling of the nuclear test site between Wednesday and Friday and invite journalists from China, Russia, the United States, Britain and the South to cover it.

On Saturday, another North Korean propaganda website, Uriminzokkiri, carried a commentary in which the North said it does not give the slightest consideration to “a mental patient’s grumble” in the South. “The international community as well as the United States and South Korea is giving a great deal of support to the dismantlement,” it said.

In the commentaries carried by the two propaganda websites, the North lambasted conservative forces in the South, including the main opposition Liberty Korea Party, for underestimating the planned closure of the site. Pyongyang apparently aims to stress the importance of the dismantlement by raising the issue again.

South Korea’s unification ministry handling inter-Korean affairs said Friday the North had not responded to the list of South Korean journalists chosen to attend the ceremony.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

South Korean presidential spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom welcomes the North Korean government’s decision to shut down its Pyunggye-ri nuclear test site between May 23-25 during a press briefing at the presidential office in Seoul on May 13, 2018. (Yonhap)

Kim Jong-un is taking a play out of his father’s denuclearization playbook with his announcement that he will seal the shafts at this nuclear test site:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has promised to dismantle a “northern” nuclear test site in May in full view of experts and journalists from South Korea and the United States, Cheong Wa Dae said on Sunday.

Kim made the promise during talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Friday, the president’s top press secretary Yoon Young-chan said.

Kim said the site is still “usable” and “there are two more shafts that are bigger than the one (to be dismantled) which are sturdy,” according to Yoon.

Kim did not specify the location of the site to be dismantled, but given the North’s past announcement, it is believed to be in Gilju, North Hamgyong Province. On April 21, Kim declared the shutdown of the Gilju site, along with a freeze on missile and nuclear tests.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but when I read this I though immediately back to 2008 when Kim Jong-il blew up a cooling tower at it Yongbyon nuclear plant:

In a gesture demonstrating its commitment to halt its nuclear weapons program, North Korea blew up the most prominent symbol of its plutonium production Friday.

The 60 foot, or 18meter, cooling tower at North Korea’s main nuclear power plant collapsed in a heap of shattered concrete and twisted steel, filmed by international and regional television broadcasters invited to witness the event.

The destruction of the tower, the most visible element of the nuclear complex at Yongbyon, about 100 kilometers, or 60 miles north of Pyongyang, bore witness to the incremental progress that has been made in U.S.-led multilateral efforts to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs.  [NY Times, June 27, 2008]

The North Koreans eventually rebuilt the cooling tower and reopened the Yongbyon nuclear facility in 2013.  As little as two months ago satellite imagery showed the plant producing plutonium.  Much like with the destruction of the cooling tower, the sealing of shafts at their Punggye-ri nuclear test site is easily reversible at a time of the Kim regime’s choosing.  However, when this event happens most of the international media and Korean leftists will once again seize on the dramatic images this is sure to bring as evidence that the Kim regime really means to denuclearize this time.

I will know Kim Jong-un means to denuclearize when the entire Yongbyon plant is demolished and his nuclear weapons and material are removed from the country.  Until this happens everyone is just continuing to play along with this great facade which the closure of the nuclear test site will be another part of.

The Japanese Foreign Minister is finding out that no one wants to hear that the North Koreans are already misbehaving before a deal has even been reached:

Foreign Minister Taro Kono got a scathing reaction from the international community over his call to not be taken in by North Korea’s latest charm offensive.

Kono insists that North Korea is gearing up for a seventh nuclear test, but his warning has fallen on deaf ears.

“(North Korea) is working hard for its next nuclear test,” Kono asserted in a lecture he gave in Kochi on March 31.

On April 2, 38 North, a website operated by Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies that is devoted to analysis about North Korea, posted an article dismissing Kono’s contention based on current activity at the nuclear test site.

“Commercial satellite imagery from March 23 shows quite a different picture: namely, that activity at the Punggye-ri test site has been significantly reduced compared to previous months,” the article says.  [Asahi Shimbun]

You can read more at the link, but it seems a nuclear test would be within the Kim regime’s playbook to conduct if a deal to their liking is not reached in upcoming negotiations.

It appears that the Kim regime is ready to nuke Mt. Mantap again:

North Korea appears to be preparing for another nuclear test despite probable aftershocks from its sixth and largest nuclear test, Sept. 3, still occurring, according to American experts on Pyongyang.

In a joint analysis released Monday, Frank Pabian, Joseph Bermudez Jr. and Jack Liu, citing satellite imagery, said there has been a “consistently high level of activity” at North Korea’s main nuclear test site in Punggye-ri.

The analysis was released by 38 North, a U.S. website specializing in North Korea-related issues.

The analysts claimed the suspected activity was detected at the West Portal, leading to an unused tunnel complex, but not the North Portal, where five of the six tests took place.

“Despite the continuation of small tremors near Mt. Mantap since North Korea’s last nuclear test, tunnel work at the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site is still underway,” they said. “These efforts continue to be concentrated at the West Portal, leaving the North Portal…mostly dormant and likely abandoned, at least for the time being. At the West Portal, there has been a consistently high level of activity since North Korea’s last nuclear test.”

The activity included the routine presence of vehicles and personnel around the portal, movement of mining carts to an adjacent spoils pile and signs of fresh spoils being dumped there.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

The usual caveats apply when it comes to these unnamed sources out of North Korea because it is so hard to independently verify what they are saying.  This source could just be telling a journalist looking for a click bait headline what they want to hear:

An artificial earthquake caused by a North Korean nuclear test in September reportedly caused buildings to collapse and killed scores of people, including schoolchildren, South Korean media reported this week.

On Sept. 3, North Korea conducted its sixth nuclear test, successfully detonating a hydrogen bomb — one that could fit onto an intercontinental missile (ICBM).

The blast produced two shallow earthquakes in the Punggye-ri region, where North Korea’s nuclear test facility is located, U.S. and Chinese government seismologists reported at the time. Authorities in Japan, South Korea and numerous nongovernment experts in the United States confirmed that the earthquakes were likely the result of a nuclear test.

An unnamed source, who recently visited a village about 8 kilometers from Punggye-ri, described the damage to the South and North Development (SAND), a research institute that works with defectors from the North, according to the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo.

The source said houses and a school collapsed in the village of Sindong-ri and that dozens of people were killed and injured, the paper reported.

“September 3 was a Sunday, but some 150 students were waiting in their classrooms to do some work,” the source said, according to Chosun Ilbo. “Casualties occurred when half of the school building crumbled.”  [Voice of America]

You can read more at the link, but if this is true the team at 38 North who analyze commercial satellite imagery should be able to confirm if there has been collapsed buildings in the days after the nuclear test. So far I have seen no reports from them confirming damaged buildings after the earthquake in North Korea.

If this report is true, the fact these workers were tunneling shows that the Kim regime has future plans for more nuclear tests:

More than 200 people are believed to have died in underground tunnels after a collapse at North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear facility.

The test site was reportedly badly shaken by the aftermath of the country’s sixth nuclear test, a 100-kiloton hydrogen bomb roughly seven times more powerful than the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

North Korean sources told Japanese television channel Asahi TV that the collapse occurred in October during the construction of an underground tunnel at the facility.

Around 100 workers were stuck underground and a group that was sent to their rescue were also buried after another collapse, causing a total death toll of around 200.

A series of small-scale earthquakes that followed the September 3 test indicated the facility, built south of the Mantapsan mountain, may no longer be stable enough to conduct further tests.  [Newsweek]

You can read more at the link, but I wonder how many of the workers killed were just forced laborers from the regime’s system of gulags?

Considering all the recent earthquakes and landslides at Punggye-ri these Chinese scientists are probably correct:

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geology and Geophysics briefed a North Korean delegation in Beijing late last month on the threat of an implosion at the mountainous Punggye-ri nuclear facility, about 80km from China’s border.

A day after North Korea said it detonated a hydrogen bomb at the Punggye-ri facility on September 3, a senior Chinese nuclear scientist warned that future tests at the facility could blow the top off the mountain, causing a massive collapse. The scientist said radioactive waste could bleed from cracks or holes at the site and be blown across the border.

Two days after the briefing in Beijing, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho announced suddenly at the United Nations in New York that Pyongyang might consider detonating a “most powerful” hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean.  (………)

A researcher studying the radioactive risk from the North Korean nuclear programme at Peking University said China could no longer tolerate another land-based explosion.

“China cannot sit and wait until the site implodes. Our instruments can detect nuclear fallout when it arrives, but it will be too late by then. There will be public panic and anger at the government for not taking action,” the researcher said.

“Maybe the North Koreans themselves have realised that the site cannot take another blow. If they still want to do it, they have to do it somewhere else.”  [South China Morning Post]

You can read more at the link.

North Korea is apparently demanding the US take 'literally' its threat to nuke the Pacific (via @BIAUS) https://t.co/ij6kZDisnH

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) October 25, 2017

A ROK defense source is saying that the North Koreans may have tested their way out of a viable nuclear test site:

Even if North Korea wants to conduct another nuclear test, it may be facing a big hurdle to preparations at its testing site amid signs of topographic damage from the previous experiment, an informed South Korean defense source said Monday.

“The possibility of North Korea’s additional provocations remains open all the time,” the source said in response to the weeks-long break in its belligerent acts, as the South’s Defense Minister Song Young-moon visited the Philippines to participate in the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting (ADMM)-Plus session.

The Kim Jong-un regime may be weighing the technological aspects of its nuclear and missile program and political timing, added the source.

The North passed the Oct. 10 founding anniversary of the powerful Workers’ Party and the opening of China’s communist party congress last week with any provocation.  (……)

But it remains unclear whether the North will be able to carry out a seventh nuclear test in the near future amid reports of continued natural earthquakes near the Punggye-ri test area following the Sept. 3 hydrogen bomb test there with the destructive yield of more than 50 kilotons, according to the source.

“If it tries to send a meaningful message to the world with another nuclear test, it would require a more powerful bomb,” added the source. “North Korea will consider whether it will keep testing nuclear weapons there, including a review of topography.”  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.