House Speaker Paul Ryan on Friday condemned North Korea’s recent nuclear warhead test and called on President Obama to join him in urging China to “fully enforce” worldwide sanctions on the country.
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North Korea carried out its fifth nuclear test Friday morning and boasted of a weapon light and small enough to be mounted atop a ballistic missile, a nightmare scenario for Washington, which has military bases in the Pacific and on its west coast within Pyongyang’s striking range.
The 5.0-magnitude seismic event Friday is the largest of the four past quakes associated with North Korean nuclear tests, according to South Korea’s weather agency.
State-run media in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang said the test moved the country closer to developing a “standardized” nuclear warhead capable of easy delivery on ballistic rockets.
“As to the possible sanctions to be adopted by UN Security Council”.
She told a meeting of top security officials Friday night that, “We have to believe that Kim Jong Un’s mental state is spiraling out of control because he is not listening to any words from the global community or neighbouring countries in his attempt to cling to power”.
Beyond crippling North Korea financially, other options include diplomatic ostracism: Katharine Moon, Brookings Institution’s SK-Korea Foundation Chair, has floated throwing North Korea out of the United Nations altogether, and written that nations with diplomatic ties with Pyongyang ought to pull their ambassadors.
Image Attribute: KRT newscaster confirming that North Korea has conducted a nuclear test in this still image taken from video on September 9, 2016. It was North Korea’s most powerful test ever.
“To be clear, the United States does not, and never will, accept North Korea as a nuclear state”, he said.
At the same time Chinese President Xi Jinging has voiced opposition to the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system to be deployed in South Korea.
“North Korea can’t handle this threat with conventional weapons, so they can only develop nuclear ones”, it said. However, North Korea is insisting that there was no leakage of radioactive materials.
This test follows the January detonation of a device the North claimed was a hydrogen bomb, which led to wide condemnation and tougher worldwide sanctions.
Pyongyang has also carried out a string of ballistic missile tests this year in defiance of United Nations sanctions, which have all been condemned by the Security Council.
The latest test comes as several countries and institutions are on the cusp of transition. “We must strongly protest against it”, Abe said, adding that Japan would liaise closely on the matter with the US and South Korea.
Kim Jong un was accused of “maniacal recklessness” by neighbouring South Korea, which said “such provocation will further accelerate [the North’s] path to self-destruction”.
In a press conference, Germany’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Steffen Seibert condemned the test and said it was an irresponsible action by North Korea to destabilise region.
At a news conference Thursday in Laos, Obama dismissed China’s objections to the THAAD deployment, saying he told Chinese President Xi Jinping “that we can not have a situation where we’re unable to defend either ourselves or our treaty allies against increasingly provocative behavior and escalating capabilities by the North Koreans”. Ban, a diplomat from South Korea, will finish his term by the end of the year.
Pyongyang provokes, the worldwide community condemns the regime and imposes new sanctions, but to little effect. “They seem to be making precisely the technical progress that people don’t want”, said Euan Graham, a security expert at the Lowy Institute in Sydney who once served as a British diplomat in Pyongyang.
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The US Air Force will fly a specially equipped WC-135 jet that can detect radiation and other particles in the sky to determine what happened in North Korea.
