It was 10:36 a.m. on October 9, 2006, when South Korea's sensors first picked up the abnormal seismic waves. Around half an hour later, experts started narrowing down the location of the epicenter. Eventually, they concluded it was Gilju County, an area in North Korea's northernmost province.
What Seoul's equipment was detecting was North Korea's first-ever nuclear test, carried out at its only known test site in the North Hamgyong region. It would end up being the first of six, spanning over a decade, that have punctuated Pyongyang's journey to weaponizing nuclear material and insisting it will be recognized as a nuclear power on the world stage, despite nearly universal condemnation. Twenty years on from North Korea's first nuclear test, its military arsenal is ballooning and South Korea's worries about its secretive but bellicose northern neighbor are anything but soothed.
South Korean analysts quickly said their data showed the 2006 explosion was likely 0.8 kilotons, which is a small yield compared with the nuclear tests carried out by the U.S. or the Soviet Union. Russia, meanwhile, put the yield of the 2006 North Korean test explosion several times higher than Seoul's estimate, although most experts say it didn't exceed one kiloton. The infamous Tsar Bomba test at Moscow's remote Novaya Zemlya site in 1961 had an estimated yield of 50,000 kilotons—more than 62,000 times the believed yield of Pyongyang's initial test.
Two weeks after the North Korean test, a monitoring station in northern Canada recorded higher levels of Xenon 133, the radioactive noble gas produced during nuclear fission. 2006 was a turning point because it was the first time in eight years the world was contending with a new nuclear test, said William Alberque, a former head of NATO's nuclear non-proliferation center currently with the Pacific Forum nonprofit. "It was a failure," he told Newsweek, "but they learned a lot." Pyongyang had warned in the days leading up to the first test that it was planning to carry out a nuclear explosion, and state media hailed it as a "great leap forward" and a "historic event." International experts, meanwhile, said the test likely hadn't gone as planned, but also acknowledged this may have been a lower-yield trial than initially thought. North Korea was then slapped with United Nations sanctions that have largely failed to halt Pyongyang's nuclear testing, nor cut off its ballistic missile development.
Pyongyang has carried out five more nuclear tests in the past 20 years, including two within roughly nine months of one another in 2016. The last test registered the largest magnitude, reaching an estimated 6.1, according to nuclear experts. It was picked up by over 100 monitoring facilities and months later, international teams had identified more than 30 smaller aftershocks around the test site.
North Korea is the only country to have carried out nuclear tests in the 21st century, and no confirmed nuclear tests have taken place anywhere in the world since 2017, despite President Donald Trump suggesting last year the U.S. would resume nuclear testing "on an equal basis" with other nations. Department of Energy then clarified it wasn't planning on carrying out nuclear explosions. The 2006 test shattered the widely-observed but unofficial pause on nuclear testing that was ushered in by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty opening up for signatures in 1996.
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