Urainium bombs are way too big to mount on their now proven ICBM systems. Obviously they are working on Hydrogen bombs with the recycled spent fuel rods supplying the Plutonium.
If the blast is successful, the next step is trying them out downrange, like in California.
Too bad our last few generations of Politicians were too busy stuffing their pockets to get their jobs done. But I guess Millions dying in American cities goes along with agenda 21.
Perhaps they were doing their jobs, they just don’t work for us.
It’s possible to build a miniaturized HEU bomb (as an implosion device, just like a Pu bomb); it’s just easier to do it with Plutonium and you can make them a bit smaller.
A lot of clueless media articles are making it sound like there’s something especially bad or powerful about a HEU bomb, which isn’t really the case - it would just mean they’ve switched to HEU because they can distribute and hide the centrifuges more easily than they can one big reactor.
There’s zero chance they’ll test a real multistage thermonuclear bomb. There is some chance they’ll test a boosted fission weapon, which uses a little bit of tritium that fuses to enhance the yield.
In the 1940s the T1/TX-1 nuclear munition using Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) with a low kiloton yield weighed on about 150 pounds. It might be possible for the North Koreans to deliver a similar weapon with their existing ICBM. Clearly the North Koreans have the benefit of 60 years of experience with nuclear weapons.