Newly revealed evidence about radiation leaks near North Korea’s prime testing site may explain a deepening mystery — why the regime of Kim Jong-un has not conducted a new nuclear weapons test in more than five years.
A report published Tuesday contends that radioactive contamination around North Korea’s nuclear test site, buried deep under mountains in the country’s northeast, is extensive, and said the previous government in Seoul downplayed the risk in order to preserve a policy of engagement with Pyongyang.
In 2017 and 2018, South Korean authorities, compelled by a defector activist and by public fears about Punggye-ri, conducted radiation tests on 40 escapees from the region, the report’s authors write — but “avoided publicizing issues expected to rattle North Korea.” Like many questions concerning the internal workings of the Kim regime, analyses of the nuclear program are fraught with uncertainty. North Korea watchers here are divided over why the North has not tested a nuclear device since September 2017, over why Pyongyang’s ballistic missile tests have ramped up since 2022, the role of China in restraining Pyongyang, and whether a new nuclear test is in the offing.
Pyongyang conducted six nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017, but halted them during the period of personal diplomacy between Mr. Kim and former President Trump that failed to produce a denuclearization deal. But despite a number of shot- and long-range ballistic missile tests since then, a feared seventh nuclear test by the North has yet to occur.
“Given the geography of the area, the line between tolerable and intolerable for China is, from Pyongyang’s perspective, uncomfortably thin,” Mr. Green, senior consultant for Korea at the International Crisis Group, added.
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