Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Akitaka Saiki, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken and South Korean First Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Lim Sung-nam are attending the talks at the Iikura Guesthouse in Tokyo.
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Experts have expressed doubt that the North’s fourth nuclear test was of a hydrogen bomb, as the blast was approxinately the same size as that from its previous test of a less powerful atomic bomb in 2013.
South Korea warned the North that the United States and its allies were working on sanctions to inflict “bone-numbing pain” for the test, and urged China to do its part to rein in its isolated neighbour.
North Korea said on January 6, 2016 that it had tested an H-bomb, provoking condemnation from its neighbours and the United States.
North Korea says it will stop conducting nuclear tests in exchange for a peace treaty with the United States and an end to joint military exercises between Washington and Seoul.
The North is extremely sensitive to outside criticism of the authoritarian leadership of Kim Jong Un and has been retaliating to Seoul’s loudspeaker campaigns by flying thousands of propaganda leaflets across the border.
North Korea will not provide anyone with its nuclear weapons, transfer-related technology or use its bombs “recklessly”, its Foreign Ministry said Friday in a statement released through the official Korean Central News Agency.
Whether successful or not, the test has allowed North Korea to move yet another step closer to the possibility of propelling a nuclear missile toward the United States or any other country in the World.
The two Koreas remain technically at war since their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce and not a peace treaty.
The country is already under a wide array of global sanctions, and diplomats have said U.N. Security Council members were expected to discuss the possibility of adding to those.
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But the statement then switched back to defiant mode, accusing the United Nations of rushing to “fabricate a resolution on sanctions aimed at such hostile acts as hamstringing our efforts for peaceful economic construction and the improvement of the people’s standard of living”.
