Test or no test?

9 October 2006, 0325 EDT

I assume we’ll be closer to an answer when I get up.

The North Korean news agency KCNA says its country has successfully conducted an underground nuclear test.

“Our science research section has safely and successfully conducted an underground nuclear test on October, 9,” it said.

It added that there was no leak or danger from the test.

There are no more details at this stage.

The South Korean News Agency Yonhap is also carrying reports that Pyongyang may have carried out the test.

Neither US intelligence sources nor South Korean defence officials can confirm at this stage that a test has taken place.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun is reported to have called an emergency meeting to discuss the North Korean nuclear issue.

“The meeting comes as there has been a grave change in the situation involving the North’s nuclear activity,” the agency quoted foreign ministry spokesman Choo Kyu-Ho as saying.

He refused to go into further detail.

But another ranking foreign ministry official quoted by Yonhap confirmed that the government received intelligence that North Korea appeared to have already carried out a nuclear test.

“The government is trying to check the intelligence,” the official said, asking not to be named.

“We are not in a position to confirm such a report,’ a South Korean defence ministry spokesman told AFP.

Either way, not good.

Filed as: North Korea

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.