North Korea is ready to detonate a hydrogen bomb to "defend its sovereignty and the dignity of the nation," leader Kim Jong Un said Thursday a threat that remains unsubstantiated.<br />It is the first time the regime, which has already conducted three atomic tests, has claimed to have built a hydrogen bomb.<br />"We don't have any information that North Korea has developed an H-bomb," Yonhap News Agency quoted an unnamed intelligence official as saying.<br />"We do not believe that North Korea, which has not succeeded in miniaturizing nuclear bombs, has the technology to produce an H-bomb."<br />But Kim, while visiting the site of a former munitions factory in central Pyongyang, asserted this week that North Korea had become "a powerful nuclear weapons state ready to detonate self-reliant A-bomb and H-bomb to reliably defend its sovereignty and the dignity of the nation," according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
