The first casualty of North Korean nuclear tests? The country’s environment

NEW YORK — Mount Paektu is an active volcano that occupies a revered place in Korean legend as the birthplace of the Korean people. But it may be paying a price for their division.

Located on the border of North Korea and China, the volcano has been appropriated by Pyongyang as the “sacred mountain of the revolution.” Propagandists for the Communist state spin a tale, most likely apocryphal, that the late leader Kim Jong Il was born there while his father was a guerrilla fighting the Japanese.

The sacred mountain, however, is just 60 miles from the site where North Korea, now led by Kim’s son, Kim Jong Un, tested its sixth and most powerful nuclear weapon on Sept. 3.

Shortly afterward, Chinese authorities closed part of the tourist park on their side of the border because of rock slides. Chinese authorities would not say definitively whether the nuclear test was to blame, but seismologists think it is likely.

The explosion registered as a magnitude 6.3 earthquake and was blamed for water bottles rolling off tables and furniture toppling in China, and apartment buildings rattling all the way to the Russian port city of Vladivostok.

It is just one example of the way that North Korea’s headlong rush to become a nuclear power is degrading the environment in and around the country’s borders.

The first casualty is inside North Korea itself, around the rugged, granite mountains of North Hamgyong province. All six of North Korea’s nuclear tests have taken place there at a site known as Punggye-Ri.

Satellite images taken after the last test show numerous landslides around the site as well as water leaking from the entrance to one of the tunnels, according to 38 North, an academic website on North Korea run by Johns Hopkins University.

“These disturbances are more numerous and widespread than seen after any of the North’s previous five tests, and include additional slippage in pre-existing landslide scars and a possible subsidence crater,” the report said.

Another analysis of satellite data found that Mount Mantap, a 7,000-foot peak above the test site, lost a little elevation from the force of the underground explosion.

“It did move the mountain,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

He said he believes, however, that there has been no significant leakage of radiation because the test took place in a tunnel more than 3,000 feet below and notes that the visible damage was less extensive than after underground tests in Pakistan.

“The North Koreans seem to be pretty good at this. They’ve buried their test site well,” he said.

After the nuclear test, the ground around the test site continued to rumble. Seismologists were particularly stumped by a tremor recorded Sept. 23 that appeared to be a magnitude 3.4 earthquake under Mount Mantap, an area that does not ordinarily experience earthquakes. A joint report published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Santa Cruz concluded that tunnels in the test site collapsed. “It was the mountain collapsing into the cavity created by the explosion … hundreds of meters below the surface,” said Thorne Lay, a professor at UC Santa Cruz.

What analysts are looking for in the satellite images are fissures and craters — which would indicate a breach in the mountain large enough to allow radiation in dangerous quantities to vent to the outside.

“These are minor landslides, nothing like you see in California with mud pouring down,” said Joseph Bermudez, a leading expert on the North Korean military and one of the authors of the 38 North report.

“Still, if I were near any nuclear test site, I would be concerned about the environment, especially an active test site,” Mr. Bermudez added. “History has shown there are often leakages … and North Korea has not had a really great record as far as environmental protection.”

North Korea has conducted all six of its nuclear tests around the same site. The Sept. 3 test involved a device estimated at 250 kilotons — 17 times the force of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

“Every country that has developed a nuclear program has harmed its own people,” said Matthew McKinzie, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The satellite photographs taken after the last test show water draining from the test site that was likely forced out from underground by explosion and could leach into the groundwater. A stream near the test site runs to the nearest sizable city, Kilju, some 25 miles away.

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