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SEOUL: If North Korea has successfully tested a nuclear bomb, as it claims, it will become the eighth country to not only possess the world's most destructive weapon but to admit openly to doing so.
At present seven countries — the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, India and Pakistan — are avowed members of the nuclear club.
An eighth state, Israel, is widely presumed to have such weapons but has never officially admitted so.
North Korea's official KCNA news agency said the test, carried out early Monday, was both safe and successful. “The nuclear test was conducted by 100 percent of our wisdom and technology,” it said.
“Our science and research centre safely and successfully conducted an underground nuclear test on October 9, 2006,” it added, saying there was no leakage of radioactive matter.
South Korea's defence ministry said the test was carried out at Hwadaeri near Kilju at 10.36 am (0136 GMT).
Until the start of the 1990s, the official nuclear roster had been joined, in chronological order, by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China.
The United States, which built the first functioning atomic bomb during World War II, is the only country to have ever used the weapons in anger.
The bombs it dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 killed an estimated 140,000 people in the former city and 70,000 in the latter.
During the Cold War which followed 1945, US allies Britain and France both armed themselves, as did its Communist rivals, the Soviet Union and then China.
The five official nuclear powers also happened to be the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, all of which are endowed with the exclusive right to veto any resolutions passed by the world body.
In 1974 India tested a single nuclear device, and in 1998 the world learned officially that both it and its rival and neighbour Pakistan possessed nuclear arsenals.
After 1991, when the Soviet Union became defunct, its arsenal of nuclear weapons was concentrated by agreement in Russia, which inherited the Soviet Security Council seat.
That meant that Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, former republics which had had Soviet nuclear weapons on their territory, gave up their stockpiles.
South Africa, which had developed nuclear weapons during the apartheid era, renounced them in 1993-4, after the advent of black majority rule.
Although other countries — most recently Iran — have been accused of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, there is no indication that any have successfully done so to date.
Nuclear weapons are so powerful that they create a military paradox, because any war between two countries which used them on a large scale would result in the complete destruction of both belligerents.
It also means that countries which already possess the weapons have little incentive to give them up because they constitute a powerful deterrent against attack.
