DPRK: Nuke test involves more powerful device

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The Democratic People's Republic of Korea says Monday's underground nuclear test involved a more powerful device.

The country's official news agency, KCNA, says the test was a new high in terms of explosive power and technology.

Here in Pyongyang, life is calm and quiet as before.

However, the news from here is reverberating around the world.

Newsreader, Korean Central Television, said, "The DPRK successfully conducted one more underground nuclear test on May 25, 2009. That's part of the measures to bolster up the country's nuclear deterrent for self-defense in every way as requested by DPRK's scientists and technicians."

Pyongyang says the results of the test helped settle scientific and technological problems arising in further increasing the power of nuclear weapons and steadily developing nuclear technology.

But the DPRK is keeping silent about when and where it happened.

Seismologists around the world are providing those answers.

Lee Duk-Ki, Director of S. Korean Quake Monitoring Dept., said, "On 25 May 2009, an earthquake, assumed to be man-made, occurred near Kilju of North Hamkyong Province around 9:54 A-M."

South Korea says Monday's seismic jolt was as strong as 4.5-magnitude earthquake and it happened in Kilju, the same area the DPRK carried out a nuclear test in 2006.

Seismologists in Seoul and Tokyo also pinpoint the seismic event in Kilju.

Russia says the blast was about equal in power to the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in World War Two or about 20 times larger than the DPRK's one kiloton test in 2006.

Meanwhile, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency quoted an anonymous source as saying the DPRK launched three short-range missiles off its east coast, following the underground test.