The single mountain under which North Korea most likely conducted its five most recent nuclear bomb tests, including the latest and most powerful on Sunday, could be at risk of collapsing, a Chinese scientist said.
Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, said: they were confident that they were all carried out from under the same mountain at the Punggye-ri test site. South China morning post reported.
Wen Lianxing, a Chinese geophysicist said that based on data collected by more than 100 earthquake monitoring centres in China, “the margin of error was no more than 100 metres.”
Meanwhile, Wang Naiyan, the former chairman of the China Nuclear Society and senior researcher on China’s nuclear weapons program, said that if Wen’s findings were reliable, there was a ‘risk of a major environmental disaster.’
“Another test might cause the whole mountain to cave in on itself, leaving only a hole from which radiation could escape and drift across the region, including China,” he said.
Sunday’s blast was followed by an earthquake eight minutes later, which China’s seismic authorities interpreted as a cave-in triggered by the explosion.
