Did he or didn’t he? That has been the question that world leaders and those who fear for our future wellbeing will have been pondering since Kim Jong Un announced on Wednesday that he had tested North Korea’s first hydrogen bomb.

The truth of the matter, according to the “experts”, is that the supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — aka Dennis Rodman’s best mate, which gives credence to the notion that there are more than a few screws loose — simply has authored the North’s fourth atomic test. All illegal since it withdrew from the Nonproliferation Policy Treaty in 2003.

The test is believed to have caused an earthquake of a 4.8 magnitude on the Richter scale and an explosive yield of 6.0 kilotons, which is smaller than the hermit state’s previous test in 2013 and smaller than what would normally be expected of a hydrogen-based fusion device.

To put that into a local context, were such a device to detonate over Bermuda, it would kill approximately 3,280 people and injure 9,020 others, with more than 25,000 caught in the PSI (Pollutant Standards Index) range. A direct hit might be less severe in terms of its overall reach, with radiation fallout taken into consideration, but there would be as many as 350 more fatalities. Almost half of the Island’s population affected.

Kim is a madman who seeks to be relevant, and most leaders acknowledge that, particularly those who have seats on the United Nations Security Council. It is not so much the bang that Kim professes to be packing, but that he is packing at all that has the international community anxiously wringing its hands.

He wants a seat at the table of nuclear powers, but they have repeatedly refused entry to a dictator who, when he is not entertaining one of the oddest personalities to come out of the ranks of professional basketball, is persecuting and starving his own people.

Bermuda, and the wider world, can be grateful that South Korea and the United States are close enough to see to it that any damage he inflicts is minimal; South Korea because it possesses a far superior military than does Kim and the US not only because it has troops and jets in support of the South, but it also has more troops and an aircraft carrier fleet in Japan.

However, the least that Kim could accomplish were his grubby hands allowed to press the red button is the destruction of Seoul, and that would send South Korea’s economy into a tailspin from which it might take generations to recover.

What’s more, China, seen to be Kim’s greatest ally — if for no other reason than to limit American influence by preventing the South from turning the two Koreas into one — is not impressed by the actions of its “little brother” or by its leader’s boast of producing an “H-bomb of justice”.

The world’s second superpower is best placed to make North Korea feel the pinch through economic sanctions, but that would only worsen the plight of the impoverished innocents of the Kim dynasty, as junior, who turned 33 today, continues on a path to following in the footsteps of his equally despotic predecessors — grandfather Kim Il Sung and father Kim Jong Il.

The consensus among scientists is that North Korea’s previous three tests were of relatively small atomic weapons of the fission type dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hydrogen, or thermonuclear, warheads, which make up most of the world’s nuclear arsenals, use nuclear fusion to create a far more powerful explosion.

The claim that it is a “smaller” bomb implies that the North has mastered a technology that for many years it was assumed to lack — the ability to miniaturise warheads to the extent that they can be mounted on a missile.

That is worrying. More so if the intelligence agencies that are meant to be observing Pyongyang’s every move fail to predict it.

The US, with some justification, can be viewed to be the biggest and baddest on the planet when it comes to nuclear arms. The leader of the free world is joined by China, France, Russia and Britain as the officially recognised nuclear weapon states, but they and the Russians, in particular, can be said to be culpable for not having reduced their stockpiles of warheads to virtually zero as originally promised.

It has spawned a belief by North Korea and those who never signed up to the treaty, including UN member states Israel, India and Pakistan, that they can do pretty much as they please.

The existing sanctions against North Korea have done little to slow what has become a ritual testing — 2006, 2009, 2013 and now 2016. It is time for the consequences to be less of a threat and more real, more hard-hitting; all without resorting to war.