Does NKorea have the money and tech to make an H-bomb?

By Andrew Jay Rosenbaum

ANKARA

After North Korea claimed to have detonated an H-bomb earlier this week, experts are asking does the pariah state even have the wherewithal and technology to make such a device?

Given the isolated country’s poor economic performance and sanctions-limited economy, their verdict is "no” -- Pyongyang’s nuclear program is not yet advanced enough, nor does the country have ready cash to bring its research and tech forward to the point of constructing thermonuclear weapons.

Richard Bitzinger, a professor with the Military Transformations Program at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, told Anadolu Agency on Thursday that there is a "lot of doubt being cast on North Korea's ability to develop a thermonuclear [fusion] bomb”. 

“It is still having problems with getting much 'simpler' fission bombs [utilizing plutonium or Highly enriched uranium] to work, and an H-bomb requires an atomic [fission] detonation in order to work,” Bitzinger said via email.

So what exactly happened Wednesday, when the government claimed it had carried out its successful test? 

Experts -- including Bitzinger -- say results show the device tested was not powerful enough to be a thermonuclear weapon.

The subsequent explosion triggered an artificial earthquake, which the United States Geological Survey recorded at 5.1 magnitude, about the same size as previous nuclear tests -- a hydrogen bomb test would have been expected to have had more of an impact.

In the aftermath of the incident, South Korean news agency Yonhap quoted a military source as saying: “It is hard to regard this test as that of a hydrogen bomb.” 

Essentially, a fusion bomb brings together the nuclei of hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium that then fuse, releasing enormous amounts of energy. A fission bomb, as was the case with the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, shoots a small amount of U-235 into a mass of that isotope.

Bitzinger says that other nuclear-proficient countries -- such as Pakistan -- do not yet possess such a fusion bomb (as far as we know), and it is unlikely that those presumed to be working on nuclear weapons (e.g., Iran) are capable of building such a weapon.

“It's probably not impossible for the North Koreans to eventually develop a fusion bomb, but they would have to perfect their fission weapons first, which is not evident even now,” Bitzinger adds.

Sico van der Meer, a research fellow specializing in non-conventional weapons with the Clingendael Institute in The Hague, underlined to Anadolu Agency that North Korea has not had a perfect record of success with its nuclear armament program.

“The explosive level was quite small in previous nuclear tests,” he says. “And North Korea has not yet even managed to fit a nuclear warhead into a missile – they haven’t worked out the design technology to make the bomb small enough."

"That puts them fairly far back in terms of technology.”

And cash is beyond doubt a major issue, Bitzinger highlights.

Economist Nicholas Eberstadt described North Korea as one of the poorest countries in the world in a report published in November 2015.

“Today the DPRK [the Democratic People's Republic of Korea] is a country which can produce and launch ballistic rockets and test atomic devices, yet it does not exceed the per capita trade output of Mali,” he wrote.

Ranked 115 out of 180 countries in terms of GDP, according to United Nations statistics, North Korea stands between Mozambique and Papua New Guinea.

Data from North Korea is difficult to analyze, Eberstadt pointed out, because the country is closed to observation by outsiders. But the best estimates show its economy as having lagged in development for years.

According to the Bank of Korea, from 1990 until 2014 North Korea's GDP Annual Growth Rate averaged 0.5 percent. 

Construction and mining, the two largest contributors to GDP, have been declining for decades, lacking investment and technical know-how, Eberstadt -- a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute -- wrote.

This has cut into Pyongyang’s exports.

“The strongest impression conveyed by these adjustments is of a stunning long-term decline in North Korea’s capability to sell commercial goods abroad. Despite North Korea’s recent trade recovery, the illustrative real level of per capita exports today looks to be no higher than in 1990, or than for much of the 1980s, or for that matter than in the mid-1970s, nearly four decades earlier,” the report reads.

Ninety percent of the country’s exports go to China, which has an uneasy alliance with the country.

This has led to a disastrous collapse of the balance of trade, which dropped to minus $695 million in 2014, according to the International Trade Center. Exports totaled $3.16 billion, down 1.7 percent from the previous year, while imports totaled $4.45 billion, up by 7.8 percent year-on-year.

“North Korea’s share of global imports appears to have dived by fully three-fourths between 1960 and 2013, from 0.11 to 0.03 percent, a trade performance decline only exceeded by Zimbabwe,” Eberstadt wrote.

Nonetheless, the country's annual military spending totals about $8 billion, according to statistics from website Global Fire Power. Adding to North Korea's economic problems are that around 5 percent of its population is in military service, according to Cligendael research fellow van der Meer -- one of the highest amounts in the world.

 “Much of North Korea’s military might is financed by the so-called ‘Office 39,’ a state agency that deals in illegal trafficking, including the sale of synthetic drugs, illegal arms sales, and illegal Internet gambling,” van der Meer says.

With economic sanctions extended by the UN in 2013 to most commercial activities, its financial lot is not expected to increase soon, and internal policy change that may enable sanctions to be lifted is unlikely to shift with dictator effective Kim Jong-un -- the grandson of DPRK founder Kim Il-sung -- firmly at the helm.

With the country still technically at war with South Korea, Kim has continued the family ploy -- Kim's father Kim Jong-il also ruled from 1994 to 2011 -- of regularly reminding the world that it has enough soldiers and firepower to level Seoul to rubbish in the space of an hour -- a threat Western Powers take seriously.

“Meaningful long-term economic progress should not be expected unless Pyongyang’s authorities systematically improve their globally worst-in-class business climate,” Eberstadt warns.