By Aaron Miller
North Korea’s latest nuclear test last week may back fire and cause a mountain collapse, according to Chinese experts. Landslides have been spotted in the detonation area of North Korea’s latest nuclear test.
The discovery comes days after Chinese experts claimed the mountain under which the rogue state’s five most recent bomb tests likely occurred was at risk of collapsing. The news comes after the North Korean Foreign ministry promised to inflict the ”greatest pain and suffering” America has ever experienced in its history if new sanctions are imposed at the United Nations Security Council Meeting held today, Monday
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Satellite images released by 38 North website today showed the weekend test triggered landslides around the blast site, despite no visible crater that would indicate a collapse.
The published satellite images show changes in the surface at the Punggye-ri test site where the ground had been lifted into the air by the tremors, and small landslides going into stream beds.
The revelation comes following the findings by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui province, expressing confidence that North Korea’s five most recent nuclear tests were carried out from under the same mountain at Punggye-ri.
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The team from the seismic and deep earth physics laboratory made the claim in a statement posted on their website on Monday. Its leader, Wen Lianxing, said that based on data collected by more than 100 earthquake monitoring centres in China, the margin of error was no more than 100 metres.
Wang Naiyan, the former chairman of the China Nuclear Society and senior researcher on China’s nuclear weapons programme, said that if Wen’s findings were reliable, there was a risk of a major environmental disaster. The scale of the environmental disaster was not mentioned, but it is believed to be confined to North Korea itself.
CAVE
Another test might cause the whole mountain to cave in on itself, leaving only a hole from which radiation could escape and drift across the region, including China, according to Naiyan.
“We call it ‘taking the roof off’. If the mountain collapses and the hole is exposed, it will let out many bad things.”
Sunday’s blast was followed by an earthquake eight minutes later, which China’s seismic authorities interpreted as a cave-in triggered by the explosion.
Not every mountain was suitable for nuclear bomb testing. Wang said, adding that the peak had to be high, but the slopes relatively flat.
Based on the fact that North Korea has a limited land area and bearing in mind the sensitivity of its nuclear programme, it most likely does not have too many suitable peaks to choose from.
How long the mountain would continue to stand would also depend on where the North Koreans placed the bombs, Wang said.
“If the bombs were planted at the bottom of vertically drilled tunnels, the explosion would do less damage,” he said.
But vertical tunnels were difficult and expensive to build, and it was not easy to lay cables and sensors to collect data from the explosion, he said. Much easier was to bore a horizontal tunnel into the heart of the mountain, but this increased the risk of blowing off the top, he said.
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