Nuke tests may destroy mountain

NORTH Korea’s nuclear testing may not lead to war, but there is another catastrophic risk: the mountain the regime has exploded six bombs under may collapse.

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post is quoting a Chinese scientist as saying if the peak crumbles, clouds of radioactive dust and gas will blanket the region.

The Punggye-ri test site is in the country’s north-east and carved deep into the side of Mount Mantap – a granite peak in the remote Hamgyong mountain range.

Geophysicist Wen Lianxing’s team at the University of Science and Technology of China have analysed data from more than 100 seismic monitoring sites across China, narrowing down the location of the tests with a margin of error of just 100m.

They’ve all been under the same mountain. And the weekend’s blast was by far the biggest of them.

It produced a shockwave similar to that of a magnitude 6.3 earthquake, indicating a bomb equivalent to 120 kilotonnes of TNT explosive.

Eight minutes later, a second quake was detected. Geophysicists around the world have been considering its implications.

So far the consensus is it was likely part of the mountain collapsing in on a cavern created where the rock was vaporised by the blast of the hydrogen bomb.

Satellite imagery also shows the blast caused numerous landslides around the Punggye-ri test site.

Radiation sampling in the region has so far returned no abnormal readings, but a nuclear weapons researcher and ex-chairman of the China Nuclear Society, Wang Naiyan, told the Morning Post such an event indicated a potential environmental disaster in the making.

One more test could cause the mountain to collapse in on itself, he warned.

“We call it ‘taking the roof off’,” Mr Wang said.

“If the mountain collapses and the hole is exposed, it will let out many bad things.

The tests posed “a huge threat not only to North Korea but to other countries”.

Satellite photos taken just a day after the blast and released by 38 North reveal new gravel and scree fields shaken loose by the blasts.

Chances are, North Korea will continue to test at the Punggye-ri test site as it has few other suitable locations.