Whether North Korea did detonate its first thermonuclear bomb on Wednesday or not – and, reassuringly, there are good reasons to believe it has again exaggerated its capabilities and the bomb's nature – the world community has little option but to respond as if it did.
Pyongyang has every intention of developing and probably will soon have the capacity to create such a devastating bomb – that uses a uranium or plutonium fission explosion to trigger another based on hydrogen fusion – and the missiles to deliver it. It has demonstrated its contempt for the worldwide ban on testing and for successive binding UN resolutions, and has threatened to use such a bomb if its sovereignty is encroached. The North has produced 10-16 crude weapons since 2003 and may have 20 by the end of this year.
Most worryingly, because such a possibility undermines the rationale for traditional deterrence constraints on a nuclear power, Pyongyang is seen as unlikely to be constrained from selling thermonuclear weapons to others – rogue states or terrorist organisations? – to obtain badly needed currency for its basket-case economy. As the head of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation Lassina Zerbo argues, North Korea's capacity is "a grave threat to international peace and security". That is to all of us, as well as North Korea's immediate neighbours.
The test explosion is estimated to have been of the order of six kilotons, the equivalent of 6,000 tons of high explosives, and about one-third of the force of the bomb which was detonated in Hiroshima in 1945. A typical large thermonuclear H-bomb would be the equivalent of hundreds of kilotons, leading to speculation that Wednesday’s test involved only a traditional nuclear bomb, but using tritium to boost its power.
Almost as alarming as the fact of the explosion is the indifference of North Korea's young leader Kim Jong-un – 33 today – to its once-influential neighbour China's angry response. He did not bother to warn President Xi Jinping of the test, and as recently as October, China had received assurances from North Korea that it would stop its nuclear tests. Beijing will now support new UN sanctions but is said to be wary of extensive trade measures which might prompt renewed famine and a mass exodus of refugees into China.
Kim, whose regime has grown steadily more vicious since he assumed power in 2011, refuses to rejoin the Chinese-led six-party nuclear talks on his country’s weapons programme, and must have expected the unanimous world response to his fourth nuclear test. He clearly feels sufficiently politically secure and personally economically sheltered to withstand another round of sanctions and further isolation that the UN will impose. But his time is running out. Bubbles burst and this monstrous, artificial state will inevitably also implode like all other Stalinist dictatorships.