Alwaght- North Korea says it has conducted a “successful” hydrogen bomb test, hours after two tremors were detected in the country.
The Japanese Foreign Ministry said on Sunday a tremor was detected in North Korea on Sunday that according to Tokyo's data were the result of a nuclear test.
"After examining the data we concluded that it was a nuclear tests,"Foreign Minister Taro Kono said at a briefing following a meeting of Japan's National Security Council, Reuters reports.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) on Sunday detected a first tremor, saying in an updated reading that the quake measured 6.3 on the Richter scale at a depth of 10 kilometers, 24 kilometers northeast of Sungjibaegam in North Korea.
China detected a second tremor, which it said was magnitude 4.6 and came at a depth of zero kilometers eight minutes after the first quake.
Witnesses in the Chinese city of Yanji, on the border with North Korea, said they felt a tremor that lasted roughly 10 seconds, followed by an aftershock, Reuters reported.
Reuters cited a nuclear engineering professor at Seoul National University as saying the bomb's "power is 10 or 20 times or even more than previous ones,”
Kune Y. Suh Said “That scale is to the level where anyone can say a hydrogen bomb test.”
Earlier on Sunday, North Korea has said it has developed a more advanced nuclear weapon that has "great destructive power" and can be loaded onto an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
The North's official Korean Central News Agency, KCNA, showed Kim Jong-un inspecting what it said was a hydrogen bomb that is to be loaded onto a new ICBM.
KCNA described it as a "nuke" in its English-language report, but called it a "thermonuclear hydrogen bomb" in the Korean version.
During a visit to the country's Nuclear Weapons Institute, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un "watched an H-bomb to be loaded into new ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile)," KCNA reported. There was no independent confirmation of the claims.
"The H-bomb, the explosive power of which is adjustable from tens kiloton to hundreds kiloton, is a multi-functional thermonuclear nuke with great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack according to strategic goals," KCNA reported in English.
Electromagnetic pulse is an intense wave of electrical energy generated by the detonation of a nuclear weapon.
"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 said.
Sunday's KCNA report on the new nuclear capability follows a week of escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
US President Donald Trump threatened on Tuesday that all options are on the table for Washington to respond to North Korea’s firing of a ballistic missile over Japan.
North Korea blames the US for escalating tensions in the region through its provocative military drills. Pyongyang insists that it is developing nuclear weapons to deal with growing threats posed by the US.
