Since North Korea’s foreign minister recently floated the idea that his country might test a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean, the North’s leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. Pres. Donald Trump have engaged in an escalating battle of name-calling and threats. As unsettling as the exchange has been, fortunately there has so far been no demonstration of thermonuclear weaponry. Many experts question whether Pyongyang actually has an H-bomb and the capability to accurately deliver it. But it is difficult to fully dismiss its sudden decision to ratchet up its rhetoric from nuclear to thermonuclear—and its suggestion that it would move its tests from underground bunkers to the open ocean.
North Korea’s six nuclear tests over the past decade have steadily grown more powerful. Whether it could build an H-bomb in the near future and would test it in the atmosphere—such tests were prohibited by the international 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty—is an open question. The environmental and health impacts this kind of test are also unpredictable and would largely depend on how the bomb is built, where it is detonated and how the weather patterns at that time affect the radioactive fallout.
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