 Volleyball games at N.Korean nuke test site: monitor Washington (AFP) April 18, 2017 - North Korea watchers said Tuesday they had observed unusual activity at the reclusive country's nuclear test site -- workers playing volleyball. The 38 North monitoring group said satellite imagery captured Sunday showed personnel at the guard barracks and two other areas at the Punggye-ri test site playing the popular game. "It suggests that the facility might be going into a standby mode," said Joseph Bermudez, a North Korea expert and an analyst for the Washington-based 38 North. "It also suggests that these volleyball games are being conducted with the North Koreans knowing that we will be looking and reporting on it. They are either sending us a message that they have put the facility on standby, or they are trying to deceive us." 38 North last week said Punggye-ri was "primed and ready" to conduct its sixth nuclear test, possibly to coincide with last Saturday's celebrations marking the birthdate of regime founder Kim Il-Sung. But that test hasn't happened yet, though North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attempted to launch a missile Sunday that the Pentagon said blew up almost immediately after launch. Punggye-ri is a complex of tunnels and testing infrastructure in the mountains in northeast North Korea. 38 North said it would be publishing the satellite imagery later Tuesday or on Wednesday. Bermudez added that the images showed several mining carts had deposited waste onto larger piles by the underground testing facility's north entrance.
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An aircraft carrier the US Navy said was steaming toward the Korean Peninsula amid rising tensions has not yet departed, a US defense official acknowledged Tuesday.
The Navy on April 8 said it was directing a naval strike group headed by the USS Carl Vinson supercarrier to "sail north," as a "prudent measure" to deter North Korea.
Pentagon chief Jim Mattis on April 11 said the Vinson was "on her way up" to the peninsula.
President Donald Trump the next day said: "We are sending an armada. Very powerful."
But a defense official told AFP Tuesday that the ships were still off the northwest coast of Australia. A Navy photograph showed the Vinson off Java over the weekend.
"They are going to start heading north towards the Sea of Japan within the next 24 hours," the official said on condition of anonymity.
The official added that the strike group wouldn't be in the region before next week at the earliest -- it is thousands of nautical miles from the Java Sea to the Sea of Japan.
At the time of the strike group's deployment, many media outlets said the ships were steaming toward North Korea, when in fact they had temporarily headed in the opposite direction.
The United States ratcheted up its rhetoric ahead of North Korea's military parade and failed missile launch over the weekend, and Vice President Mike Pence on Monday declared that the era of US "strategic patience" in dealing with Pyongyang was over.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un responded with his own fiery warnings and threatened to conduct weekly missile tests.
It was not clear if the issue was the result of poor communication by the Navy, but some observers were critical.
Joel Wit, a co-founder of the 38 North program of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University, said the matter was "very perplexing" and fed into North Korea's narrative that America is all bluster and doesn't follow through on threats.
"If you are going to threaten the North Koreans, you better make sure your threat is credible," Wit said.
"If you threaten them and your threat is not credible, it's only going to undermine whatever your policy toward them is."
The strike group has been conducting drills with the Australian navy in recent days, the official said, though it scrapped a planned port visit in Australia as a result of the new orders.
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