North Korea's nuclear tests are killing North Koreans

North Korean hydrogen bomb test.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

North Koreans who live near their government's underground nuclear weapons testing location are suffering serious effects of radiation poisoning, defectors from that region report. While there is almost no scientific evidence available to support their claims — because defectors are few and North Korea remains mostly closed to outsiders — with only one exception experts interviewed by NBC News said they do not doubt the reports.

"So many people died we began calling it 'ghost disease,'" Lee Jeong Hwa, a defector who escaped in 2010, told NBC. "We thought we were dying because we were poor and we ate badly. Now we know it was the radiation."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.