Around 200 people have died at one of North Korea’s nuclear testing after a tunnel collapsed on workers.
The disaster is a major embarrassment for North Korea, laying bare the crumbling state of the hermit state’s testing facilities.
And now one nuclear expert warned despot Kim Jong-un could launch a huge nuclear missile into the Pacific in a show of force.
Joshua Pollack said Kim would push for a provocative “public demonstration” to regain some control.
He said: “North Korean leadership undoubtedly feels pushed into a corner.”
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Mr Pollack said Kim could make good on his promise earlier this summer to launch “the most powerful detonation of an H-bomb in the Pacific”.
This would most likely be the ‘Juche Bird’ H-bomb – the most powerful weapon North Korea possesses.
The H-bomb would be launched from the hermit state’s east coast over Japan into the Pacific, where it would explode over the ocean.
It would destroy any living being in the immediate vicinity, sending fallout across a wide area.
And a failed detonation could see the missile come hurtling down onto Japan.
One expert said the prospect was “truly terrifying”.
Vipin Narang, a nuclear strategy expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: “And if the test doesn’t go according to plan, you could have population at risk, too.
“We are talking about putting a live nuclear warhead on a missile that has been tested only a handful of times.
“It is truly terrifying if something goes wrong.”
Yesterday it was revealed around 100 people were killed when an unfinished tunnel collapsed at Kim’s Punggye-ri testing facility in an incident thought to have occurred on September 10.
Another 100 people subsequently died while attempting to rescue the first group of entombed workers.
Punggye-ri was the site of North Korea’s sixth-ever nuclear test on September 3. They tested a huge 100-kiloton explosive which was around seven times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima during WW2.
This test is believed to have badly destabilised the mountainside-based facility, with China, South Korea and America warning North Korea to prepare for a possible collapse.