China joined the rest of the worldwide community in approving tough new sanctions on North Korea in March. “But what North Korea is aiming for is to put them on an intercontinental ballistic missile”, she said.
Advertisement
North Korea said it conducted a “nuclear warhead explosion” in response to perceived USA hostility.
“Now that the USA posed threats to the dignity and the right to existence of the DPRK, defying its serious warning, it will continue to take a series of eventful action steps as a full-fledged military power”, the spokesman said, using the official abbreviation for North Korea.
In appearances in Florida and Washington, Trump used the North Korean development to attack Clinton.
Its continued testing in defiance of sanctions presents a challenge to Obama in the final months of his presidency and could become a factor in the US presidential election in November, and a headache to be inherited by whoever wins.
Global sanctions include suspending currency transfers and restricting the North’s lucrative mineral trade that had accounted for over half of the country’s $2.5 billion in exports to China alone. Obama said he had told Xi that China needs to “work with us more effectively” to rein Kim in. “We must strongly protest against it”, Abe said, adding that Japan would liaise closely on the matter with the United States and South Korea.
“We should be able to defend ourselves against flying nuclear bombs or we should be able to make North Korea give up its nuclear program”.
The statement called for the issue to be resolved through six-party talks – the long-stalled negotiations chaired by China that also brings together the two Koreas, Japan, Russia and the United States.
“And the North has every technological, political, strategic and national reason to continue testing both nuclear devices and missiles, particularly if it wants fully functioning nuclear-tipped missiles”. North Korea has conducted a slew of long-range and medium-range ballistic missile tests this year that show they are improving their missile capabilities.
North Korea had previously conducted four nuclear tests, all at Punggye-ri, and they had caused similar patterns in seismic activity. During a Trump presidency, he promised at a Friday night rally in Pensacola, Florida, ships trying to provoke the U.S.
Other world leaders also condemned the test. President Barack Obama, who spoke with Geun-hye via phone after the test, said the US will never accept North Korea as a nuclear power, AP reports.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said the test shows the US needs to be tougher on North Korea, and blamed the Obama administration for failing to implement the sanctions options approved by Congress just this year.
“The same goes with every missile test”, said Duyeon Kim, a visiting senior research fellow at the Korean Peninsula Future Forum, an independent think tank in Seoul. The superpower, which shares a border with North Korea, has stated that it would “file a protest diplomatically”.
The blast at the Punggye-ri nuclear site was the North’s fifth and most powerful yet at 10 kilotons – approaching the might of the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in 1945, experts in Seoul said. But Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo, also a voting member, was more cautious and said on Friday in an interview with CNBC he wanted to see more evidence of US inflation rising back toward the Fed’s 2 percent target, although he would not discount the possibility of a hike this year.
That blast came just days after North Korea test-fired three ballistic missiles, which landed in Japan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, about 155 miles (250 kilometers) from a Japanese island.
North Korea is thought to have a handful of rudimentary nuclear bombs and has spent decades trying to flawless a multistage, long-range missile to eventually carry smaller versions of those bombs.
China has said the THAAD system would destabilize the regional security balance without achieving anything to end North Korea’s nuclear program.
Advertisement
The Korean Peninsula remains technically at war, as the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty.
