NUCLEAR WEAPONSNorth Korea’s Nuclear Tests Expose Neighbors to Radiation Risks
Tens of thousands of North Koreans and people in South Korea, Japan, and China could be exposed to radioactive materials spread through groundwater from an underground nuclear test site. North Korea secretly conducted six tests of nuclear weapons at the Punggye-ri site in the mountainous North Hamgyong Province between 2006 and 2017.
Tens of thousands of North Koreans and people in South Korea, Japan, and China could be exposed to radioactive materials spread through groundwater from an underground nuclear test site, a Seoul-based human rights group said in a just-published report.
North Korea secretly conducted six tests of nuclear weapons at the Punggye-ri site in the mountainous North Hamgyong Province between 2006 and 2017, according to the U.S. and South Korean governments, Reuters reports:
The study by the Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG) said radioactive materials could have spread across eight cities and counties near the site, where more than 1 million North Koreans live, and where groundwater is used in everyday lives including drinking. It also said that neighboring South Korea, China and Japan might be at risk due partly to agricultural and fisheries products smuggled from the North.
“The populations in neighboring countries such as South Korea, China and Japan are also exposed to the radioactive risk from the contaminated agricultural and marine products imported from North Korea,” the report said.
TJWG, formed in 2014, worked with nuclear and medical experts and defectors and used open source intelligence and publicly available government and U.N. reports for the study, which was backed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a non-profit corporation funded by the U.S. Congress.
Here are the Introduction and Major Findings sections of the TJWG report:
Introduction
There have been calls in the past to highlight the linkage between the North Korean nuclear and human rights issues. In January 2013, Navi Pillay, then-UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, expressed her concern that “at the international level, the spotlight is almost exclusively focused on DPRK’s nuclear program and rocket launches” and added that “while these, of course, are issues of enormous importance, they should not be allowed to overshadow the deplorable human rights situation in DPRK, which in one way or another affects almost the entire population and has no parallel anywhere else in the world” as she called for a full-fledged international inquiry into serious crimes that had been taking place in North Korea.(1)
