North Korea Ready to Test Hydrogen Bomb in Pacific Ocean in Response to US Threats / Ahn Young-joon / AP

In response to US threats, North Korea is ready to test a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean, North Korean Foreign Minister Lee Yong Ho said on Friday: "This could be the most powerful hydrogen bomb explosion in the Pacific Ocean" (quoted by TASS). Following him, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un himself responded to US President Donald Trump's recent speech at the UN, in which he said that America has the ability to completely destroy the DPRK. He said that the "so-called US president" "took from his tongue an unprecedented, crude, crazy nonsense, which was not the case with any of his predecessors" (quoted by KCNA). "Since Trump has gone to deny and insult the very existence of me and our country in front of the world, we, for our part, will [go to] unprecedented, extremely harsh retaliatory measures in history. <...> I will definitely, definitely tame the crazy American old man with fire,” Kim Jong-un concluded, calling Trump a hooligan and a gangster.

Trump responded on Twitter the same day, promising that "Kim Jong Un, who is obviously a madman who doesn't mind starving or killing his own people, is going to be tested like never before."

According to Vladimir Khrustalev, editor of the North East Asia Military Studies project, North Korea is technically ready to test a missile with a nuclear warhead, but the minister's statement is not yet a direct threat to do so. The situation is aggravated by the fact that many in the West believe that North Korea does not have warheads ready for use on missiles, the expert adds. According to Pavel Podvig, editor of the Russianforces website, there are also experts in the West who believe that such statements could provoke tests. In his opinion, the governments of the United States and Japan are most likely seriously considering such a possibility, even if they consider it unlikely. Similar real launches of missiles with a nuclear warhead were carried out by the USSR and the United States before the 1963 treaty banning tests in three environments, Podvig recalls.

Pyongyang Will Blow Up the Pacific Ocean