North Korea is making fresh claims that it has the hydrogen bomb

North Korea says it now has advanced hydrogen-bomb capabilities, according to a report from the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Sunday (Sept. 3) after the country’s leader Kim Jong-un visited a weapons facility in Pyongyang.

Kim met with nuclear scientists and “watched an H-bomb to be loaded into new ICBM,” KCNA said. The report stated that scientists had built on the developments of a nuclear test in January 2016, in keeping with the party’s intention of “bringing about a signal turn in nuclear weaponization.” The report came just days after a Trump administration ban on travel by Americans to North Korea took effect.

North Korea’s 2016 claim of testing a hydrogen bomb was met with skepticism. Hydrogen bombs are far more powerful than atomic weapons and the seismic pattern generated by that explosion wasn’t substantially larger than in North Korea’s previous nuclear tests.

The test of an intercontinental ballistic missile in July showed North Korea’s weapons program isn’t standing still. “We have to remember that, only a little over five years ago, people would basically laugh every time North Korea tested a missile because it exploded over their heads,” Victor Cha, Korea Chair at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, and tipped to be the next US ambassador to South Korea, said in July. “But really from the end of 2012 until the present, while they have had failures, they have made steady, significant process.”

It may not be possible to get fresh evidence that North Korea now has a far more powerful bomb until it conducts another nuclear test.

North Korea watchers say that could be imminent. North Korea’s last nuclear test, its fifth, was on Sept. 9, 2016, a national holiday to mark the foundation of the communist state.

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