Seoul, Jan 3 (EFE).– North Korea could be preparing to test its ability to produce a hydrogen bomb, the South Korea intelligence services said Sunday based on recent military activity by Pyongyang.

The announcement comes a month after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un mentioned for the first time that his country has an H-bomb, although at the time experts doubted that the Asian pariah state could have developed the highly destructive weapon.

The North Korean regime has already completed construction of the necessary installations to test an H-bomb and it could be producing tritium, a nuclear isotope used to make such weapons, according to the report made public by South Korea’s chemical, biological and radiological defense unit.

The document says that Pyongyang has dug a new tunnel at its Punggye-ri nuclear complex that “could be designed for thermonuclear testing,” and the construction of which was detected by U.S. intelligence services last week.

Pyongyang to date has conducted three nuclear tests – in 2006, 2009 and 2013 – all of them at the Punggye-ri complex.

However, the South Korean weapons of mass destruction unit, which is part of the Defense Ministry, considers there to be little chance that the possible nuclear test would be that of an H-bomb.

The North could detonate a fission bomb, or atom bomb, but South Korea does not think that it is yet capable of directly testing hydrogen bombs, given that it does not seem to have reached the final production phases for those weapons, the report says. EFE