Kerry said he spoke with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi earlier on Thursday about various options for responding to North Korea’s fourth nuclear test.
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“And we agreed and respected to give them space to be able to implement that”.
“Today in my conversation with the Chinese I made it very clear: That has not worked and we can not continue business as usual”, he said. It was, however, an unambiguous demonstration that the United States, as well as China and North Korea’s other neighbors, are failing in their attempts to restrain the regime and its ambitious 30-something ruler, Kim Jong Un. Even a test of an atomic bomb, a less sophisticated and less powerful weapon, would push its scientists and engineers closer to their goal of building a nuclear warhead small enough to place on a missile that can reach the US mainland.
The U.S.is asking China to not only support more robust action at the United Nations, but to apply its own unilateral economic pressure, as North Korea’s largest benefactor.
In his policy speech for this year, which was disclosed on January 1, Kim said that a variety of attack mechanisms must be developed and manufactured, but he made no reference to a nuclear test. “It seems that was a trick to make the latest test unpredictable”, said one South Korean source, who suggested that military provocations consistent in style with this recent “surprise attack” can be expected again in the future.
South Korea’s military has issued the highest alert in frontline areas, where propaganda loudspeakers are installed, a day before its planned resumption of the broadcasting toward the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Their consultations followed a meeting of the 15-member UN Security Council in NY which, with backing from China, Pyongyang’s sole major ally, strongly condemned the test and said it would begin work on a new UN draft resolution that would contain “further significant measures”.
BBC reports that the broadcasts are set to start again on Friday, which happens to be the 33rd birthday of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Media said the assets could include B-2 and B-52 bombers, and a nuclear-powered submarine. It claimed the last, on Tuesday, was a hydrogen bomb, though the White House has shed doubt on that assertion. Nuclear-tipped missiles could then be used as deterrents and diplomatic bargaining chips – especially against the US, which Pyongyang has long pushed to withdraw its troops from the region and to sign a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War.
Ruthless in consolidating power, he could, by the time he is middle-aged, have the capacity to attempt a nuclear strike against the United States, not to mention South Korea and Japan.
There is still widespread speculation over what device the North actually did test, but global experts mostly concur that it could not have been a full-scale thermonuclear device as claimed. On the other hand, H-bombs release energy by the process of fusion, which makes them hundreds of times more potent than A-bombs.
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The censure and sanctions threats had a familiar ring, given similar outrage that greeted the North’s previous tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013, and some voices stressed the need to find a strategy that combined coercion with negotiation.
