Voice of America:
Undeterred by international rebukes and increased sanctions in 2016, North Korea set forth to advance and legitimize its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, but then paused suddenly, most likely to assess unexpected political changes underway in the United States and South Korea.
North Korea began the year with a powerful nuclear bomb blast in January that caused a magnitude 5.1 earthquake. The state-controlled news organization KCNA claimed the military had successfully tested a miniaturized thermonuclear hydrogen bomb 100 times more powerful than past weapons tested.
But some analysts were skeptical. An examination of air samples and seismic data indicated the explosion was not powerful enough to be an H-bomb, and was more likely a conventional nuclear bomb made with enhanced fuels.
The nuclear test ended a brief period of inter-Korean cooperation during which the North and South arranged a rare reunion for families separated by decades of division and considered other types of nonpolitical exchanges.
With the January test, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was setting a new, uncompromising and defiant tone, openly declaring his intention to force the world to accept his country as a nuclear state, and rejecting U.N. Security Council resolutions banning the North’s nuclear and missile programs.
Regional security analyst Daniel Pinkston said that beyond the existential threat to the world posed by permitting the unpredictable and repressive North Korean state to possess these weapons of mass destruction, acquiescing to Pyongyang’s demand to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty it signed in the 1980s could also spark a new global arms race.
“If other states were to look at this and say, ‘Well, we can do that as well. There are no costs to nuclear breakout. We would like to acquire our nuclear deterrence as well, because it’s basically costless,’ I think that makes the world a much more dangerous place,” said Pinkston, a lecturer in international relations at Troy University in Seoul.
