We all watched as the TV announcer in the pink hanbok praised North Korea’s successful test of a hydrogen bomb.

The North Korean media once also told us that Kim Jong-il hit five holes-in-one at his first attempt at golf. We didn’t believe that story, and we shouldn’t believe this one. Yet many people are responding with great credulity to North Korea’s claim of reaching an extraordinary level of technical sophistication, despite a lack of supporting evidence. Speculation is swirling — what if North Korea had a hydrogen bomb?

What we know today is the same that we knew three years ago: that North Korea is capable of setting off an explosion in a tunnel that registers around a 5 on the Richter scale. No evidence yet supports Pyongyang’s claim of detonating a hydrogen bomb. Beyond that, we have no evidence that the North Koreans could successfully miniaturize that bomb to fit it onto a missile; that North Korea could successfully launch and target said missile; or that the bomb would successfully detonate in real-world conditions (as opposed to highly controlled testing conditions). Daryl Press and I wrote about this for 38North after the 2013 nuclear test.

We know one thing for sure: that North Korea has nuclear weapons, and will continue to test nuclear devices as well as missiles in order to develop a reliable deterrent. After all, as Keir Lieber and Daryl Press and I wrote in our article in Foreign Affairs, during the Cold War, the United States —a country that was deeply concerned with having a reliable nuclear weapons capability, as North Korea is today  — conducted 1,054 nuclear tests from 1945 – 1992. North Korea’s fourth test will not be its last.