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 by Staff Writers Beijing (AFP) April 25, 2018
North Korea's underground nuclear test site has partially collapsed following a massive bomb blast last year, making it unusable, Chinese seismologists have concluded. The North's leader Kim Jong Un declared last week that his regime would halt nuclear and long-range missile tests and shut down its nuclear site at Punggye-ri under Mount Mantap in the country's northeast. The offer came days before his summit this Friday with the South's President Moon Jae-in, which is scheduled to be followed by a summit with US President Donald Trump. North Korea conducted five of its six nuclear tests at the site, with the biggest blast last September 3 triggering a 6.3-magnitude earthquake that was felt across the northern border with China. The North claimed it tested a hydrogen bomb. Landslides and earthquakes following the explosion led to speculation that the site was suffering from "tired mountain syndrome". Two studies involving Chinese experts have found that a 4.1-magnitude aftershock that took place 8 1/2 minutes after the first quake caused the collapse of rock inside the mountain. "It is necessary to continue monitoring possible leaks of radioactive materials caused by the collapse incident," said the University of Science and Technology of China in a summary of one study posted on its website. The university said the study would be published in Geophysicial Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. An English-language abstract by the study authors in another section of the university's website concluded: "The occurrence of the collapse should deem the underground infrastructure beneath mountain Mantap not be used for any future nuclear tests." The line about the site being unusable does not appear in the Chinese-language summary and it was unclear whether it would be included in the journal. One of the study's authors, Lianxing Wen of New York's Stony Brook University, did not immediately respond to emailed questions. A second study led by Chinese scientists, including experts from the China Earthquake Administration, also concluded that the September aftershock had caused a collapse. "The aftershock was neither a secondary explosion nor a triggered tectonic earthquake," said the second study, published last month, also in Geophysicial Research Letters. "It occurred due to a process comparable to a 'mirror image' of the explosion, that is, a rock collapse, or compaction, for the ?rst time documented in North Korea's test site," it said. The second study, however, did not determine whether the site was unusable or leaking radiation. "Seismic models, like in this paper, provide only partial understanding of the underground explosions," it said, adding that further studies are necessary to look at radioactive leaks or possible groundwater contamination. The two studies reached their conclusions by looking at data from seismic monitoring stations. China has deployed radiation monitoring stations along its border with North Korea. A state-run newspaper in the northeastern province of Jilin last year published a list of tips on how civilians can protect themselves in the event of a nuclear attack.
Seven decades of danger and detente between two Koreas The North's leader Kim Jong Un will meet the South's President Moon Jae-in on the southern side of the border truce village of Panmunjom, ahead of a summit with US President Donald Trump expected in the coming weeks. Friday's meeting comes after tensions soared last year as the North made rapid progress on its banned nuclear weapons programmes, while Trump engaged in an increasingly bellicose verbal scrap with Pyongyang's leader. North and South previously held summits in Pyongyang in 2000 and 2007. Here are some key moments in the decades-long standoff between the two Koreas: - War but no peace - The US and Soviet Union agreed to divide the Korea between them in the days after Japan's surrender ended the Second World War and its rule over the peninsula. In June 1950 the Communist North invaded the capitalist South, sparking a brutal war that killed millions of people. Beijing backed Pyongyang in the three-year conflict, while Washington threw its support behind the South -- alliances that have largely endured. The two sides fought each other to a stalemate and hostilities ceased in 1953 with an armistice rather than a formal peace treaty, leaving them technically still at war. - Sending in the assassins - Pyongyang has tested the ceasefire with numerous attacks. It sent 31 commandos to Seoul in a botched attempt to assassinate then-President Park Chung-Hee in 1968. All but two were killed. In the "axe murder incident" of 1976, North Korean soldiers attacked a work party trying to chop down a tree inside the Demilitarized Zone, leaving two US army officers dead. Pyongyang launched perhaps its most audacious assassination attempt in Myanmar in 1983, killing 21 people in a bomb blast in a Yangon mausoleum, but visiting South Korean general-turned-president Chun Doo-hwan survived. In 1987 a bomb on a Korean Air flight exploded over the Andaman Sea, killing all 115 people on board. Seoul accused Pyongyang, which denied involvement. The North's founder Kim Il Sung died in 1994, but under his son Kim Jong Il it continued to prod its southern neighbour. In 1996 a North Korean submarine on a spying mission ran aground off the eastern South Korean port of Gangneung, sparking a 45-day manhunt that ended with 24 crew members and infiltrators killed. A clash between South and North Korean naval ships in 1999 left some 50 Northern soldiers dead. - Rays of hope - The South's first liberal president for decades, Kim Dae-jung, instituted a "Sunshine Policy" of engaging with the North, and went to Pyongyang in 2000 for the first inter-Korean summit since the Korean War, earning himself the Nobel peace prize. Inter-Korean projects followed, including the Kaesong industrial park, where South Korean firms employed North Korean workers, and hundreds of thousands of Southern tourists visited the North's scenic Mount Kumgang. Kim's liberal successor Roh Moo-hyun went back to Pyongyang in 2007 towards the end of his term, but the North had already carried out its first nuclear test and after conservative Lee Myung-bak was sworn in the following year Seoul took a harder line against Pyongyang. The Mount Kumgang trips came to an end when a visitor was shot dead for entering a forbidden area, and in March 2010 Seoul accused Pyongyang of torpedoing one of its corvette warships, killing 46 sailors -- an allegation the North denies. That November the North attacked a civilian-populated area for the first time since the war, firing 170 artillery shells at Yeonpyeong island. Four people were killed, including two civilians. - Going nuclear - North Korea has steadfastly pursued its banned nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, seeking to build a rocket capable of delivering a warhead to the US mainland, with progress accelerating under Kim Jong Un, who inherited power in 2011. In response, the UN Security Council, US, EU and South Korea all imposed increasingly tough sanctions on the North, with the Kaesong industrial zone shut down in 2016. Pyongyang remained defiant, last year carrying out its sixth nuclear test, its biggest by far, and launching missiles capable of reaching the US. Kim has since declared the country a nuclear power. - 'Peace Olympics' - Following years of tensions, the South's election of the pro-engagement Moon Jae-in as president and its hosting of the Winter Olympics gave the neighbours a window to reopen communications. At the opening ceremony the two Koreas marched together and Moon shared historic handshakes with Kim's sister Kim Yo Jong and the North's ceremonial president Kim Yong Nam. The Koreas later agreed to hold Friday's summit, and Trump accepted Kim's invitation -- relayed by Southern envoys -- to meet. At the weekend the North declared a moratorium on nuclear tests and intercontinental missile launches, in an announcement immediately welcomed by Trump as "very good news".
S. Korea's Moon lauds North's test halt as 'significant' Seoul (AFP) April 23, 2018 South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Monday praised the declaration of a moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests by the North's leader Kim Jong Un, days before a summit between the two men. Pyongyang's move was "a significant decision towards total denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula", Moon said in a meeting with aides. Kim declared that Pyongyang had no further need for nuclear tests or intercontinental ballistic missile launches, and no further use for its atomic test site, th ... read more
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