The North Korean Missile Crisis (it's more of a hazard to London than mainland USA)

Why London is an easier target for North Korean missiles than mainland American cities!  As for American soil at Guam, the fact is that Hiroshima in Japan is closer to North Korea.

Guam's Office of Civil Defense advice to duck and cover against North Korean nuclear missile strike: page 1 of 2.

Guam's Office of Civil Defense advice to duck and cover against North Korean nuclear missile strike: page 2 of 2.

ABOVE: North Korean missiles crisis advice on protection against nuclear attack covers some key points, but ideally should also include the fact (as we blogged previously) that smartphones in camera mode with the lens covered by black tape/paper detect nuclear radiation as random flashes, so everybody normally does have the means to determine the relative intensity of fallout dangers.  The greater the saturation of the screen with white flashes (impacts of radiation on the CCD camera chip pixels), the greater the dose rate.  Thus, you can observe the relative intensity in different parts of a building, and choose the safest area to shelter, and you can tell when the fallout has decayed appreciably, permitting evacuation.  There is also a downloadable app which turns a smartphone into a radiation meter for a more accurate assessment of the fallout situation:

With the North Korean Missiles Crisis looming, it's probably worth while pointing readers to our 6 January 2016 blog post (linked here) on the possible use of North Korean nuclear armed missiles: electromagnetic pulse.  In summary, the West has published declassified patents of practical warhead ejection systems for ICBMs and SLBMs, as well as designed for miniature implosion systems suitable for missile warheads, and in any case, if North Korea goes for an EMP attack at 100 km burst altitude (for which the fusing system is simply a timer and a deceleration switch in series, so that the warhead detonates immediately upon hitting the upper portion of the atmosphere when just beginning reentry), even a very poor guidance system will be adequate.  EMP covers such a large area than the missile could be hundreds of miles off target, and still produce major effects!

What is not a problem, however, is the usual over-hyped claims about civilian mass casualties from nuclear weapons.  Simple countermeasures protect people from nuclear weapons far more efficiently than they do from conventional weapons, where there is less time to react to quickly arriving hazards over the smaller danger areas.

Please see also the earlier blog post from 11 May 2015 on North Korean missiles.  It looks as if Kim Jong Un is producing nuclear missiles in trying to deter America from coercing it or invading it to topple the dictatorship.  The real problem here is not North Korea alone, but the risk of horizontal escalation in a war.  For example, China is the neighbour of North Korea, and could be sucked into a war, possibly being (reluctantly) pressed into supporting North Korea.  All the other anti-West countries, from Iran to possibly Russia, could end up supporting North Korea for propaganda reasons.

Sanctions against North Korea look like a repeat of the mistake America made in placing sanctions on Japan in the 1930s when it was invading China: eventually Japan declared war on America with a strike on 7 December 1941.  Sanctions also failed and eventually led to war with Iraq under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.  The smarter way to deal with dictatorships is the "deterrence to motivate peace" method Reagan used in the 1980s to end the expansion of the USSR's nuclear arsenal: Reagan simply re-armed to parley.  He included low-yield tactical nuclear weapons which (unlike the previous cold war mainstream dogma of the incredible threat of megatons on cities) proved to be a more credible deterrent, and a real motivator for peace talks.

Some links to earlier posts on the North Korean missiles crisis:

January 2016 test: http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/7-kiloton-north-korean-miniature.html

May 2015: http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/north-koreas-kim-jong-un-on-8-may-2015.html

March 2013: http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/north-korean-strike-plan-for-mainland.html

October 2006: http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2006/10/north-korea-announces-first-nuclear.html






"The so-called War Powers Clause of the constitution says that only once war has been declared by Congress can the president lead the military into it. However, the president does have the authority to order a nuclear attack, not only in retaliation but also as a preemptive measure(pdf, p.1) to stop an attack on US territories. The system in place for deploying the US’s more than 7,000 nuclear warheads was developed during the cold war and rests on a core element: The president, and only the president, has the authority to authorize a strike, and nobody can legally veto him."

 - https://qz.com/1051837/can-donald-trump-launch-a-nuclear-attack-on-north-korea-on-his-own/  This same site also lists the nuclear release procedure in detail:

1. Get out the biscuit: The president holds the nuclear codes, called the “gold codes,” on a laminated card called “the biscuit” that he carries. New codes are provided daily by the National Security Agency (NSA). The biscuit includes a number of fake codes, so the president has to memorize where the right ones are located.
2. Get the football: The “football” is the briefcase containing secure communications equipment as well as instructions on how to verify the president’s identity and transmit the command. The football is carried around by a military aide who is always near the president.
3. Order an attack: Once his identity has been verified, the president can order an attack—though the details of how he does it are secret.
4. Execution: The secretary of Defense is notified of the order, but isn’t legally required to give approval for the attack, and doesn’t have the power to veto it; nor does anyone else in the chain of command. The system is designed to launch within minutes of the president’s order. Still, officials might find ways to delay or impede what they thought were rash decisions, as two of president Richard Nixon’s (paywall) Defense secretaries did.

Again, the key problem is that horizontal escalation may follow vertical escalation: several enemies of the West who are not normally very close allies (China and Russia, for instance) may feel comradeship and form an alliance in order to challenge what they perceive (through paranoia) as a threat from whoever stops North Korea.  (This also occurred when Churchill offered comradeship to Stalin in June 1941, in order to get rid of Hitler faster, despite being an enemy of communism.)

"North Korea on Wednesday announced detailed new plans to fire four ballistic missiles at an area just 19 to 25 miles off Guam’s shore. ... Friday morning, Guam’s Office of Civil Defense issued official guidelines on how to survive a nuclear missile strike. Written as dryly as possible, the guidelines are still terrifying. “If caught outside,” the fact sheet notes, “do not look at the flash or fireball” of a nuclear strike, “as it can blind you.” It recommends taking cover, lying on the ground and covering your head if caught outside, and getting underground as quickly as possible. Guam’s Pacific Daily News didn’t help ease people’s fears any, either. In inch-high bold font, Friday’s front-page headline simply read “14 MINUTES” — the amount of time Guam residents would have to duck and cover before a North Korean missile would hit." 

- https://www.vox.com/world/2017/8/11/16127990/guam-guidelines-nuclear-attack

Calling civil defense duck and cover advice "terrifying" is plain silly: as we proved in the previous post, detailed data on survival proved the validity of duck and cover in houses which were blown up by blast.

Updates (20 August 2017):

Hiroshima and Nagasaki "Duck and Cover".  The earlier post quoting Hiroshima and Nagasaki "duck and cover" survival (Trumbull's 1957 book, Nine Who Survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Personal Experiences of Nine Men who Lived Through Both Atomic Bombings) is:

https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/britains-1950-studies-of-nuclear-911.html

Some of these Hiroshima and Nagasaki (double nuclear explosion) survivors helped by "duck and cover" against flying glass on seeing the flash.  As we point out in the comments section below, when you have a very bright old fashioned magnesium photo flash go off a foot from your face, or see a nuclear explosion nearby, the intensity can exceed the kilowatt/m^2 that normal sunlight gives, and then the pain ensures that instinctive "duck and cover" kicks in without any training.   This is ignored in FEMA's standard models of standing personnel behind windows in a nuclear explosion, explaining the difference in DCPA/FEMA blast calculated effects to actual Dirkwood Corporation Hiroshima and Nagasaki data.  You turn away, cover eyes with hands, and drop on your knees with face to the ground until the retina pain subsides, which takes tens of seconds, thus affording some duck and cover protection against flying glass and displacement.

Above: a 1975 Russian civil defense poster on "duck and cover", evacuation in a crisis before declaration of war (as Britain did for cities in "Operation Pied Piper" on 1 September 1939, two days before declaring war), and simple low cost shelters proved at nuclear weapons tests (for propaganda reasons their agents in the Western media and politics/CND sneered at the "futility" of civil defense in an effort to encourage the West to give up and disarm, but internally they had a different approach).

On another topic of relevance, pseudo-liberalism (aka hypocrisy) in Britain is creating a left wing fascist, Jew hating, capitalism hating, Nazi style repetition of former Labour MP, Sir Oswald Mosley: a "people's party" which claims, in the words of former London Mayor "Red" Ken Livingstone, that Hitler was a Zionist Jew supporter "before he went a bit mad."  This is causing increasing hate attacks on Jews, analogous to the situation prior to Hitler's election in 1933.  Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn makes "friends" (his own word) with Jew murdering terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah.  The result is increasing terrorism against Jews and Christians:

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/843325/jewish-people-flee-britain-rise-anti-semitism

A third of Jewish people want to flee the UK, survey reveals 

A THIRD of Jewish people in Britain have considered leaving because of a surge in antiSemitic hate crime, a survey reveals today, writes James Fielding. 

PUBLISHED: 00:01, Sun, Aug 20, 2017 

More than three-quarters believe that the Labour Party’s stance on Israel have stoked rising levels of bigotry while Islamist extremism is cited as their biggest concern. 

The YouGov poll, commissioned as part of a report by the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), also found that more than half felt the justice system is not doing enough to combat the problem.
It comes as figures obtained under a Freedom of Information request showed a 45 per cent rise in anti-Semitic crime since 2014. ... Meanwhile Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who referred to Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends”, has been repeatedly criticised for failing to crack down on anti-Semitism within the party.

Labour’s former London mayor, Ken Livingstone, was suspended last year after claiming that Adolf Hitler was a Zionist. 

This followed Bradford West MP Naz Shah being forced to apologise for a Facebook post which joked that a “solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict” was to relocate Israel to the United States. ...

Let's try to get the hypocrisy clear.  The BBC with its vast Labour pseudo-socialist political lobby (biased producers, journalists, researchers etc) is siding with the racists, failing to investigate and expose the hatred of Jews by using one-sided propaganda: saturation coverage of small scale retaliation against fascists without any sense of balance or comparison with the crimes done by the racist rants supported by Jeremy Corbyn's friends like "Red" Ken Livingstone.  When pressed, Corbyn either ignores questions or makes a bland moral equivalence between all sides, which BBC reporters accept.  However, when Donald Trump argued that General Lee, whose statues are being destroyed by pseudo-liberals in America who believe that "liberty" means destroying anything they don't agree with, was not a Nazi, the BBC reporters on Trump claimed that General Lee was in effect Hitler's brother because the Confederacy used slavery.

Pseudo-liberalism is plain fascism; it is racist anti-Jew "anti-capitalist" bigotry dressed up with propaganda as "peace", "freedom", and democracy", like the August 1939 Soviet-Nazi Pact to invade Poland and start WWII.  Pseudo-liberalism is more hypocritical in its Nazi style hatred than General Robert Lee's Confederate slavery, because by the time of the American civil war of 1861-5, racist slavery had already been officially abolished for decades in Britain - there was still white slavery in brothels, however, as Herman Kahn points out in his original 1962 edition of Thinking About the Unthinkable (not the 1984 version of similar title) - and racist slavery's days were numbered everywhere.  Pseudo-liberalism makes slaves through its USSR style bigotry and dictatorship, which is anti-freedom, anti-liberalism, anti-democracy, and anti-peace.  Until the Cold War nuclear weapons propaganda of the USSR's original pseudo-liberalism is debunked, we remain slaves to media tyranny, which allows these nasty hypocrites the freedom to circulate lying hate attacks that start wars:

“Seventy-five years ago white slavery was rampant in England. Each year thousands of young girls were forced into brothels and kept there against their will. ... One reason why this lasted as long as it did was that it could not be talked about openly in Victorian England; moral standards as subjects of discussion made it difficult to arouse the community to necessary action. ... Social inhibitions which reinforce natural tendencies to avoid thinking about unpleasant subjects are hardly uncommon. The psychological factors involved in ostrich-like behavior have parallels in communities and nations. ... 

“Perhaps some evils can be avoided or reduced if people do not think or talk about them. But when our reluctance to consider danger brings danger nearer, repression has gone too far.  In 1960 I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war, to ways of reducing the likelihood of such a war, and to methods for coping with the consequences should war occur despite our efforts to avoid it. The book was greeted by a large range of responses—some of them sharply critical. Some of this criticism was substantive, touching on greater or smaller questions of strategy, policy, or research techniques. But much of the criticism was not concerned with the correctness or incorrectness of the views I expressed. It was concerned with whether any book should have been written on this subject at all. It is characteristic of our times that many intelligent and sincere people are willing to argue that it is immoral to think and even more immoral to write in detail about having to fight a thermonuclear war. ... In a sense we are acting like those ancient kings who punished messengers who brought them bad news. This did not change the news; it simply slowed up its delivery. On occasion it meant that the kings were ill informed and, lacking truth, made serious errors in judgment and strategy. ...

“Clemenceau once said, “War is too important to be left to the generals.” A colleague of mine, Albert Wohlstetter, has paraphrased the remark to the even more appropriate, “Peace is too important to be left to the generals.” If we treat all questions of the deterrence and fighting of war as a subject to be entrusted solely to those in uniform we should not be surprised if we get narrow policies. The deterring or fighting of a thermonuclear war certainly needs specialists in and out of uniform; but it involves all of us and every aspect of our society. … Critics frequently refer to the icy rationality of the Hudson Institute, the RAND Corporation, and other such organizations. I’m always tempted to ask in reply, “Would you prefer a warm, human error? Do you feel better with a nice emotional mistake?”

– Herman Kahn, Thinking about the Unthinkable (New York: Horizon Press, 1962)

Hate attacks on Jews widely in Britain following pseudo-liberalism "socialist" pro-fascist ("Hitler was a Zionist") hate attacks on Jews led by "Red" Ken Livingstone (former London Mayor, Labour Party) and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour "Momentum" propaganda gang.  (Click photo for larger view.)  We warned that the pseudo socialists were turning Britain into another Nazi state for the purposes of trying to built up a new USSR (Corbyn is a hard communist) in this earlier blog post: https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/british-new-evil-fascist-democracy.html  Ignore the truth and you get war.

Jeremy Corbyn loves radical Islam (not moderates, just jihadis, Hamas "friends" and Hezbollah "friends") because he hopes it will destroy Jews and Christians: and it pays off since nobody powerful in the media is doing a Woodward and Bernstein daily rant to expose his racist, communist, bigotry (whereas they would if he was Conservative).  The hypocrisy is very revealing and debunks the notion that it would have been easy to debunk Hitler in the 1930s if he hadn't hypnotised the West with the threat of gassing cities, burning cities, and blowing cities up.  The unpleasant truth is that many communists including leaders like Stalin were anti-Semitic (claiming falsely that all Jews were evil capitalists) and many "elitist" scientists at the time were corrupted by eugenics pseudo-science, particularly medical Nobel laureate Alexis Carrell, who proposed the gas chamber solution for political rebels to the Nazis in a bestseller which falsely claimed - like Hitler and Marx - that diversity and freedom is a weakness, and conformity a strength (it is still taboo to mention that).  Result:

A third of Jewish people want to flee the UK, survey reveals

A THIRD of Jewish people in Britain have considered leaving because of a surge in antiSemitic hate crime, a survey reveals today, writes James Fielding.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/843325/jewish-people-flee-britain-rise-anti-semitism

PUBLISHED: 00:01, Sun, Aug 20, 2017

UPDATE (23 August 2017) on political correctness aka offensive, bigoted ranting fascist hate attacks by Stalinist "peace movement" pseudo-liberals (aka terrorists)

Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next

Afua Hirsch

While the US argues about whether to tear down monuments to the supporters of slavery, Britain still celebrates the shameful era

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/22/toppling-statues-nelsons-column-should-be-next-slavery

Joke from my dad (who was an evacuee in WWII after the Nazis started bombing Colchester, and was a hydrogen bomb era U.K. Civil Defence Corps instructor from 1951 until 1957), regarding the BBC Look East saturation coverage of the Guardian newspaper's lefty campaign to destroy all the statues of Admiral Lord Nelson, hero of the Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) due to links to slavery:

"So are they going to pull down and destroy all the Roman statues now, because the Romans had slavery too?!"

(Update: he now adds the suggestion that according to the pseudo-liberalism agenda, the pyramids of Egypt should also be destroyed, because the Ancient Egyptians used Jews and others as slaves.)

The Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833 in Britain, although white slavery persisted long afterwards as Herman Kahn points out in the quotation given earlier; in America slavery was abolished by the 13th amendment to the constitution in 1865.  Practically the entire population of Britain was in effect a slave to the King in medieval times, before the signing of the Magna Carta on 15 June 1215.  So maybe the pseudo-liberals (the new slave controllers) will soon be going around blowing up and trashing, like so-called Islamic State terrorists, all the ancient relics from the past? As I've been saying since the 1990, the USSR propaganda machine's legacy is a continuation of left wing "divide and rule" hate and fear tactics including race wars, religious wars, cultural wars, and class wars; exactly the strategy used to demoralise opponents to dictatorial, thuggish Nazis in the 1930s.

Pulling down statues to start civil wars that result in people being injured and killed is a typical fascist "divide and rule" tactic, since it gives an excuse to impose a police state.  We all find lots of things offensive, but we don't go around trying to destroy monuments and kill people because of it.  The slavery issue falls down like the feminist rights to vote militant issue because the racist and sexist side of it is one part, and bigger picture is that the majority of the population of Britain only got any voting rights in the Reform acts of 1867 and 1884, when ordinary people (in cities and in the countryside, respectively) were given voting rights.  In any case, democracy is so watered down in one vote for small choice of similar candidates every four years (and a refusal of the media to really accept the result as in the 2016 American election), it remains a travesty of freedom, and the reality is a dictatorship by groupthink media bigotry.  In effect, everyone is still a slave to laws and conventions imposed by a small number of similar-thinking bigots, which is the opposite of the true meaning of "democracy" in Ancient Greece, where it was invented as a daily referendum on issues (something that could be implemented with quick and easy secure database daily online referendums, using similar secure technology to online banking systems).  Trying to provoke a race war by claiming that slavery is a purely race issue is inaccurate and dangerous; it is not liberal and tolerant.

Civil war fanatics want to pull down Lord Nelson's statue from Trafalgar Square in London, because of links to slavery: http://metro.co.uk/2017/08/23/nelsons-column-should-be-pulled-down-because-he-was-a-white-supremacist-6872593/ If everything connected to slavery is to be pulled down, Rome will lose all its Roman statues, and Egypt will lose its pyramids. Destroying the cultural heritage of the place because some people are offended by some aspects of life from the past is what Islamic State's fanatics have been doing for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_cultural_heritage_by_ISIL

Update (24 August 2017): Watch the BBC one hour 2013 documentary on Machiavelli, available on YouTube at present



In 2013, the BBC broadcast a documentary on Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince (it was the 500th anniversary of the writing of the book in 1513, which was first published in 1532, five years after the author's death in 1527 aged 58), which is key to understanding nuclear deterrence (as well as how to avoid a miserable life being trodden on by others who see virtue as a weakness, how to succeed in business, academia, journalism, communism and all political parties), which someone (not me) put on YouTube on 7 June 2017 and has now (24 August 2017) already had 195,595 views!

It's clear that the BBC loves and uses Machiavelli's methodology (while pretending, like all of Machiavelli's pseudo-critics, to hate him), even to the point of hypocritically claiming to be in favour of "speaking truth" (the BBC motto) while ruthlessly removing BBC content from YouTube, even when it has become basically archive material (if you have ever published an article in magazine, you will know that the author sells first serial rights, which mean that after the article is out of print - i.e. when the next issue appears - the copyright reverts to the author who can publish it free on the internet if they want, a concept that helps disseminate information freely while still giving paid media the chance to profit from exclusive first publication rights, a concept that is sadly lacking in BBC TV copyright bigotry).  So catch this while it's available.  The bottom line is that Machiavelli was framed for a conspiracy and arrested in 1513, being tortured on the rack (he was stretched 3 notches without his spine cracking).  Then he wrote what his editors in 1532 called The Prince (his original version had no title) while recovering from torture under house arrest.

He therefore knew the harsh reality of a lack of power and influence in the world, and this BBC documentary (which will doubtless soon disappear from YouTube due to the Machiavellian BBC copyright enforcers) proves just how influential his principles are in all areas of human activity.  Nuclear deterrence, using fear to prevent world war, is a vital Machiavellian principle the lefty BBC doesn't mention (obviously), but it does mention the application to war (e.g. the Iraq war).  In a nutshell, if you don't have enough power to simply ignore enemies, and you are forced into a fight, you might have to use underhand tactics merely to survive, regardless of moral principles! A classic example is the clash between moral principles in education and competition in education: in schooling, Marxist teachers had no qualms in the contradiction on encouraging inequality in sports races and exams, while preaching a doctrine of equality as the way to morality! Machiavelli is simply a messenger, delivering an understanding of the principles people really use in life (while they are hypocritically denying so), and to shoot the messenger to avoid understanding and thinking about the reality is the real immorality, since it prevents any honest, reliable solutions being developed to end suffering in wars and conflicts.

Update (2 September 2017): 30 August 2017 Daily Mail scare mongering on North Korea, ignoring credible deterrence and civil defence, as usual

Above: bonkers contrived, ignorant Daily Mail analysis, something you'd expect to find from American nuclear bigots, ignoring civil defense and credible nuclear deterrence (used successfully against the USSR in the cold war) as options.  Sanctions don't work: they failed with North Korea in the past, they failed with Iraq's Saddam, they failed with Japan's invasion of China in 1937 (Japan ended up bombing Pearl Harbor in 1941, escalating WWII to the Pacific theatre). What works is the neutron bomb deterrent against invasions, first tested underground in Nevada in 1963 by Kennedy's administration.  Sanctions also provably cause no real hardship to the dictators at the top, but hardship to the poor slaves at the bottom.  Funny, but on the issue of sanctions against North Korea, we agree with the Marxist, anti-nuclear CND vice chair, and Labour Party Leader, Jeremy Corbyn:

"Jeremy Corbyn identified North Korea as “not a rogue state” and opposed sanctions against the Communist country over its development of nuclear weapons." - June 4, 2017, http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/812956/jeremy-corbyn-north-korea-not-rogue-state-opposed-sanctions

The problem here, of course, is that although we agree on the failure of sanctions, we don't agree on much else.  He wants to promote divide-and-rule wars (civil, class, religion, cultural and race) to get power by producing a crisis that he can claim he understands and can alone resolve (presumably with gulags and repression for anyone who disagrees with anything he says).  His solution is for the world to follow North Korea's glorious example!

Update (3 September 2017): congratulations to Kim for his first deliverable hydrogen bomb, and please keep them in North Korea as a deterrent (rather than detonated over Japan, Guam, London, or California)

North Korean hydrogen bomb test 3 September 2017: at least Kim Jong Un is open with the design, allowing pictures of the actual bomb tested to be published.  It certainly appears to have two distinct stages and the shape suggests it is a "peanut" type hydrogen bomb with spherical shaped primary and secondary stages, like the 300-475 kt American nuclear warhead W87 for missiles.

American 300-475 kt W87 peanut shaped nuclear warhead for missiles, which appears somewhat similar to the photos of the device tested by North Korean on 3 September 2017.  The North Korean test seismic signature is reported so far as 50-60 kt, so it would appear to be a smaller yield version than the W87.  The diagram above shows an outer radiation case of Uranium-238, whereas the North Korean photos appear to show they have used a steel case, which would reduce yield (14.1 MeV fusion neutrons would cause fission in a uranium-238 outer case, but obviously not in steel).

This photo gives the relative scale of the primary and secondary stage diameters.  The horizontal silver cylinder with arming and firing cables on the table behind the warhead is the bus which would connect the warhead to the missile section.

55 kt North Korean hydrogen design tested 3 September 2017.

Note that the umbilical cables from the missile bus (far left, on table) goes to the fission primary stage, which has a greater diameter than the fusion stage (far right). (Click image for larger view).

Update (4 September 2017): Kim Jong Un has confirmed our warning from years back that he is interested in using high altitude EMP attacks to shut down power lines, computers and communications over wide areas which do not require accurate guidance systems

“The H-bomb, the explosive power of which is adjustable from tens kiloton to hundreds kiloton, is a multi-functional thermonuclear nuke with great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP [Electromagnetic Pulse] attack according to strategic goals,” the Korean Central News Agency reported. - http://dailycaller.com/2017/09/02/north-korea-reveals-shocking-images-of-possible-h-bomb-warhead/

See also:

The North said in its statement Sunday that its H-bomb "is a multi-functional thermonuclear nuke with great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack according to strategic goals."

Kim, according to the statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, claimed that "all components of the H-bomb were homemade ... thus enabling the country to produce powerful nuclear weapons as many as it wants." - http://kdow.biz/news/politics/nkorea-says-it-has-loaded-h-bomb-onto-icbm

North Korea has made a point of releasing photos of nuclear weapons, releasing a photo of a 60 cm diameter fission implosion warhead for the KN-08 ICBM in March 2016:

Kim Jong Un with first deliverable nuclear fission implosion warhead for the KN-08 ICBM, photographed March 2016.  According to the UN, Kim has reportedly been selling thermonuclear bomb components like lithium-6 over the internet via Green Pine Associated Corp, which could potentially result in well-funded terrorists acquiring such weapons: they have already sold missile gear to Iran, Syria, Egypt and Yemen. Israel bombed the North Korean nuclear reactor in Syria ten years ago. 

Update (5 September 2017): President Putin confirms that Kim Jong Un will never surrender to United Nations sanctions which will be "catastrophic" like the decision of America to impose tough sanctions on Japan after it invaded China (Japan hit back with a military strike against Pearl Harbor in 1941, which eventually escalated into nuclear warfare in August 1945, with two nuclear weapons dropped on cities).  Sanctions also failed as an alternative to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/05/seoul-seeks-bigger-warheads-conducts-live-fire-navy-drills-north/ :

Sanctions will never make North Korea give up its nuclear programme, warns Putin

•  Alec Luhn, moscow 
 
• Neil Connor, beijing 

5 SEPTEMBER 2017 • 7:03PM

"Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, said on Tuesday that US-led calls for harsher sanctions on North Korea were futile and warned that military escalation could lead to a global catastrophe, arguing that Pyongyang rightfully fears for its security.

"Mr Putin called North Korea's nuclear test on Sunday “provocative” but said Kim Jong-un “definitely won't forget” the US-led military actions in Libya and Iraq.

"Saddam Hussein gave up his weapons of mass destruction only to be hanged after the US invasion, he said.

“The use of any kind of sanctions in this situation is already useless and ineffective,” Mr Putin said. “They will eat grass but they won't give up (the nuclear) programme if they don't feel safe.”

"Mr Putin’s comments came as concern grew that the North was planning to carry out another weapons test – possibly the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile to mark the anniversary of its founding this Saturday."

Ranges of North Korean Missiles: the KN-14 is designed to have a range of 6200 miles (reaching the UK and California), while the KN-08 will be able to reach almost the entire USA (except for Florida) with its 7200 miles range.