Kim Jong-un says North Korea has a hydrogen bomb

According to the Chicago Tribune, Yonhap News Agency reports having no reliable information that the country can produce a hydrogen bomb, apart from Jong-un's statement. However, experts remain sceptical.

Under Kim Jong Un, however, North Korea has repeatedly asserted itself to be a nuclear state and has refused to return to multilateral talks aimed at convincing it to disarm.

Such apparatus use fusion to generate a blast a lot more strong than a fundamental atomic bomb.

Seoul, Dec 11 South Korea and North Korea (DPRK) on Friday began a vice ministerial-level meeting in Pyongyang's border city of Kaesong. He said, however, that he believes Kim's regime could be close to having one.

But the Asia Programme head at the UK's Royal Insitute of International Affairs, John Nilsson-Wright, was sceptical, saying it fitted into a previous pattern of bold claims from the North Korean leader.

North Korea is critical of the annual military drills between South Korea and the United States, calling them rehearsals for war.

But its conventional weaponry is dated, with limited effectiveness, and it has looked to developing its nuclear capabilities to project power internationally.

However, any such device it might be working on would be cruder and more old-fashioned than the classical H-bomb and would require larger nuclear tests than North Korea has yet conducted.

Kim Jong Un's latest announcement comes on the heels of claiming that it has successfully miniaturized a nuclear warhead to mount on a ballistic missile. The Soviet Union was the first country to test a hydrogen bomb in 1961.

Because it's impossible to know how legitimate a threat North Korea really is.

According to analysts and insiders, any discussion on North Korean human rights will happen over the objections of China and Russian Federation.

"The U.N. Security Council should put Pyongyang on notice that those implicated in crimes against humanity may soon have to face justice". The claim was greeted with scepticism by US and South Korean intelligence officials.

There is no evidence that North Korea has made such a weapon, they said.

In early 2010 a South Korean navy ship was sunk, adding to tensions and ending ties between the two countries.

Kim made the comments as he toured the Phyongchon Revolutionary Site, which marks the feats of his father who died in 2011 and his grandfather, state founder and eternal president, Kim Il Sung, the official KCNA news agency said.

Beijing called on Thursday for constructive efforts to ease tension on the Korean Peninsula. "It is a horror novel and it's a distressing story but I think there will be action", he said.

"We are closely monitoring and tracking any and all of North Korea's nuclear activities", a defense ministry added.

The dictator said: "If we struggle in the same spirit with which the workers produced submachine guns by their own efforts just after the liberation of the country when everything was in need, we can further build up our country into a powerful one no enemy dares provoke".

North and South Korea are still technically at war as the 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a treaty.

The North has threatened to ruin its important ally, America, in a sea of fires and the South.

Global pressure on North Korea has been building since the publication of the UN Commission of Inquiry report in February 2014.