North Korea’s threat to test a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean “would be off the chart,” former CIA Director Michael Hayden said Friday.
“We have no environmental concerns for safety and so on,” Hayden, who also headed the NSA, told Jake Tapper on CNN. “That would be so dramatic.”
North Korea’s foreign minister issued the threat early Friday — telling reporters that any response to a U.S. attack on Pyongyang “could be the most powerful detonation of an H-bomb in the Pacific” — in the escalating rhetoric between dictator Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump.
All six of North Korea’s nuclear tests thus far, dating to 2006, have been conducted in underground tunnels.
No hydrogen bomb has been used in battle by any country, but more than 200,000 people died in Japan after the U.S. dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then another three days