N. Korean leader issues hydrogen-bomb threat

The talks came a day after North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un said the country had developed a hydrogen bomb – a claim treated with scepticism by USA and South Korean intelligence officials.

“Kim needs to shower party and political officials with gifts and boast (about) national wealth to his people”, said Nam Sung-Wook, professor of North Korean Studies at Korea University.

“It’s a serious question-those claims-but we take very seriously the risk and the threat that is posed by the North Korean regime and their ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon”.

Britain’s Deputy U.N. Ambassador Peter Wilson said that if there was evidence North Korea was committing new violations of U.N. resolutions “then we will take action through the Security Council”. “We will do our best to resolve them one by one”, South Korea’s Vice Unification Minister Hwang Boo-gi, who is leading the Seoul delegation, told reporters before heading to Kaesong.

North Korea has conducted three nuclear tests since 2006, but despite plenty of saber-rattling, it has not detonated a device since the beginning of 2013.

The tour, launched in 1998, was suspended in July 2008 when a South Korean female tourist was shot dead by a North Korean soldier after allegedly venturing into an off-limit area.

Any attempt to refer North Korea to the worldwide court would likely be vetoed by China.

Tritium is a key component in the design of more thermonuclear weapons with far greater yields than those made only of plutonium and uranium.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a news conference in Beijing that China has consistently upheld achieving denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, safe-guarding peace and stability there and resolving issues through dialogue and reconciliation.

According to David Albright and Serena Kelleher-Vergantini, authors of a paper published by the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, the nation could be attempting to use its nuclear complex Yongbyon to produce tritium, which is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen capable of boosting an atomic bomb’s destructive power. The North has threatened to destroy the South and its major ally, the United States, in a sea of flames.

North Korea has often made threats about its nuclear arsenal in the past.

South Korea’s intelligence community was skeptical about the North’s H-bomb capability, with an intelligence official saying that the North is not believed to have such capabilities when it has not yet mastered the technology to miniaturize nuclear warheads.

The New York Times notes a state-run newspaper claimed in 2010 the country was in the middle of developing the technology.