“The two leaders also… agreed that the North should pay the appropriate price for the latest nuclear test and vowed to closely cooperate to have a strong resolution adopted at the UN Security Council”, it added.
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The test, the fourth time North Korea has exploded a nuclear device, was ordered by young leader Kim Jong Un, state media said. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon denounced the nuclear test as “deeply troubling” and “profoundly destabilising” for regional security.
North Korea’s state news agency later said in a statement that Pyongyang would continue to develop its nuclear program as a means of deterrence against potential acts of aggression from the United States.
Wednesday morning, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test, creating an artificial quake of around 5.1 magnitude.
The United States doesn’t think so, with White House spokesman Josh Earnest saying, “The initial analysis is not consistent with the North Korean claims”.
Japan is particularly sensitive to North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests as prevailing winds blow from the Korean peninsula towards Japan and Pyongyang’s ballistic rockets have flown over Japan into the Pacific Ocean. “What North Korea really wants is a conversation, recognition and respect from South Korea, but even more from South Korea, from the United States”, Asia-Pacific Global Research Group Jasper Kim said.
China is North Korea’s economic lifeline, but it has been reluctant to use more leverage over the ally because it could lead to the North’s collapse and instability on its border.
But a successful test would mark a major and unanticipated advance for its still-limited nuclear arsenal and push its scientists and engineers closer to their goal of building a warhead small enough to place on a missile that can reach the USA mainland.
Kim Sok Chol, a 32-year-old man who watched the TV announcement on a big screen at the train station square, told The Associated Press that he does not know much about what a hydrogen bomb is, but added that “since we have it, the USA will not attack us”.
Hydrogen bombs use a two-step process of fission and fusion that releases substantially more energy than an atomic bomb.
Pearson says the test put China in a hard spot.
The weapons yield was initially estimated at between six and nine kilotons – similar to the North’s last nuclear test in 2013.
United Nations diplomats confirmed that talks were under way on strengthening several sets of sanctions that have been imposed on secretive North Korea since it first tested an atomic device in 2006.
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He wrote: “If North Korean H-bomb test reports are true, it is a grave breach of #UNSC resolutions & a provocation which I condemn without reservation”.
