Hours before the UN Security Council was set to meet to discuss Pyongyang’s latest military provocation, the country’s supreme leader hailed Monday’s firing of three mid-range weapons.
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The United States and Japan had requested Tuesday’s consultations.
Following the urgent closed-door meeting, some council members expressed interest in taking further action against Pyongyang, which is already subject to five United Nations sanctions resolutions.
The UN and the West have imposed a series of sanctions on Pyongyang over its nuclear and missile activities.
The council expressed serious concern that North Korea carried out the launches “in flagrant disregard” of its demands.
“Once the DPRK has the capability to do so, we know what they intend to do with these missile systems, because they have told us – they are explicit – they intend to arm the systems with nuclear weapons”, she said.
The program, being installed in South Korea, is a USA anti-ballistic missile system created to shoot down North Korean missiles.
Calling for a united and stern voice on denuclearizing North Korea topped President Park Geun-hye’s message during her meeting with the Association of Southeast Asian Nation member states on Wednesday in Laos.
The spokesperson also said it is nonsense for the Security Council to take issue with the North’s missile launches while remaining silent to the US bringing vast means of nuclear war into the Korean Peninsula and conducting nuclear war exercises.
He said the recent ballistic missile launches were “provocations” that flouted global law and “would only lead to further isolation”. Submarine-based missiles are harder to detect before launch than land-based ones like Rodongs.
Melissa Hanham, an expert on North Korea’s weapons programme at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California, said it was hard to determine so far if there had been any technical progress.
“We are going to work diligently together with the most recent United Nations sanctions that are already placing North Korea under the most intense sanctions regime ever”, Obama said.
But a South Korean official who spoke anonymously said it is “unclear” whether North Korean laborers in third countries like China can be protected under the new law, South Korean newspaper Munhwa Ilbo reported last week.
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North Korea fired three medium-range missiles that landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone Monday. China is North Korea’s only major ally, but ties between the neighbors have frayed amid a string of North Korean nuclear and missile tests and what many outsiders see as other provocations in recent years.
