Up to 200 killed as tunnel caves in at North Korea’s nuclear test site

Up to 200 killed as tunnel caves in at North Korea’s nuclear test site

President Donald Trump has an action-packed trip to Asia slated to begin Sunday, starting in Japan before heading to South Korea and China, then Vietnam and the Philippines.

Ahead of this international tour, two U.S. strategic B-1B bombers conducted drills over South Korea. North Korea was quick to condemn that action.

News of the drills was first reported by North Korean state news agency KCNA on Friday, which said the exercises involving South Korean and Japanese fighter jets were a “surprise nuclear strike drill”.

“The reality clearly shows that the gangster-like U.S. imperialists are the very one who is aggravating the situation of the Korean peninsula and seeking to ignite a nuclear war,” KCNA said.

However, strategic bombers may be the least of North Korea’s worries. Legal Insurrection readers may recall my report that a number of Chinese geologists were becoming concerned that the mountain under which the rogue nation was conducting its tests was becoming dangerously unstable.

There are reports that a tunnel associated with that test site has caved-in, which may be the first phase of more complete collapse.

Japanese broadcaster TV Asahi said around 100 people were trapped when the unfinished tunnel caved in at the Punggye-ri site, which lies south of the Mantapsan mountain, 50 miles from the border with China.

The Telegraph reported that the incident occurred on Oct. 10, citing South Korean news agency Yonhap.

Another 100 people could have died in a second collapse as they attempted to rescue their trapped colleagues, TV Asahi reported.

Seismic data from the area show a steady stream of small earthquakes. Satellite monitoring show that peaks are shifting. Both are indicative of “Tired Mountain Syndrome.”

“The underground detonation of nuclear explosions considerably alters the properties of the rock mass,” Vitaly Adushkin and William Leith wrote in a report on the Soviet tests for the U.S. Geological Survey in 2001. This leads to fracturing and rocks breaking, as well as changes along tectonic faults.

Earthquakes also occurred at the United States’ nuclear test site in Nevada after detonations there.

“The experience we had from the Nevada test site and decades of monitoring the Soviet Union’s major test sites in Kazakhstan showed that after a very large nuclear explosion, several other significant things can happen,” said Richards, the seismologist. These include cavities collapsing hours or even months later, he said.

Here’s to hoping President Trump’s visit will lead to a solution for the region’s “Crazy Dictator Syndrome” before more testing and further geologic stresses occur.

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