TOKYO – North Korea appears to be getting ready to conduct another nuclear test, South Korean President Park Geun-hye said Monday, citing signs of increased movement around the North’s nuclear test site.
With a much-hyped congress of the communist Workers’ Party to be held early next month, Kim Jong Un appears to be trying to burnish his credentials, and analysts say that a fifth nuclear test would be a sure-fire way to do that.
“Recently, signs of preparations for a fifth nuclear test have been detected,” Park said during a meeting with her aides on Monday. “We are in a situation in which we cannot predict what provocations North Korea might conduct to break away from isolation and to consolidate the regime,” she said, according to local pool reports from the meeting.
This came after her defense ministry said that North Korea’s next underground nuclear test might be of a miniaturized warhead, rather than of the standard atomic devices it has thought to have detonated previously.
“Given the latest developments, North Korea could carry out an underground nuclear warhead test and we are keeping close tabs on it,” Moon Sang-gyun, a defense ministry spokesman, told reporters in Seoul on Monday.
The North’s official Korean Central News Agency last month reported that Kim Jong Un had ordered “a nuclear warhead explosion test and a test-fire of several kinds of ballistic rockets able to carry nuclear warheads” to be carried out “in a short time.”
North Korea has been claiming that it has now mastered the technology to make nuclear weapons small and light enough to fit onto a missile, but there has been no proof to back up its claims. However, an increasing number of military top brass and private sector analysts believe that North Korea will have either made or be on the brink of making this technological advance soon.
South Korean officials had previously warned Sunday that they had detected a noticeable increase in vehicles and people moving around North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site, particularly around its north portal tunnel. All four of North Korea’s previous tests have been carried out underground at the Punggye-ri site, in the country’s northeast.
Analysts at 38 North, a website devoted to North Korea, said they also saw in satellite imagery increased movement around the north portal, but that there was little evidence that Pyongyang was planning an imminent nuclear test.
“Nevertheless, that possibility can not be entirely ruled out since the North may be able to conduct a nuclear test on short notice with few indications that it intends to do so,” Jack Liu, a military analyst, wrote in a note on the site.
A fifth nuclear test would create another conundrum for the international community as Kim’s regime has proven impervious to coordinated efforts to change his calculus when it comes to North Korea’s nuclear program.
Last month, the United Nations Security Council passed the toughest sanctions yet against North Korea as punishment for its January nuclear test and the February long-range rocket launch.
