Indonesian government deplored on Saturday the latest nuclear test conducted by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), saying it was not in line with the world peace and stability.
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The man-made natural disaster, detected by US instruments Friday at 5.3 in magnitude, was more powerful than any of the previous underground tests conducted by the government of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un – indicating that the weapon detonated with a yield of about 10 kilotons.
Activists in Seoul set fire to placards showing the portrait of the North Korean leader.
Yun added that the test proved North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was clearly unwilling to change and tougher sanctions and pressure were needed to apply “unbearable pain on the North to leave no choice but to change”.
The test, the second one in eight months, was carried out at the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site, located less than 100 km from North Korea’s border with China.
“In line with this commitment and the gravity of this violation, the members of the Security Council will begin to work immediately on appropriate measures” in a new United Nations resolution, the statement said.
South Korea’s president said the detonation, which Seoul estimated was the North’s biggest-ever in explosive yield, was an act of “fanatic recklessness” and a sign that leader Kim Jong Un “is spiraling out of control”. But the North’s ruling party newspaper said on Saturday it would not submit to US nuclear “blackmail”, and described the South’s President Park Geun-Hye as a “dirty prostitute” for working with USA forces.
“So North Korea can now show off their nuclear capability proudly”, Suh said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it may take more than additional sanctions to resolve the crisis, suggesting that a Security Council agreement may prove hard. It has conducted a series of missile tests since then, including of a submarine-launched missile, in defiance of those resolutions.
DPRK state-run television reported early Friday that the country had conducted a nuclear warhead explosion test.
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 USA presidential election in November, and a headache to be inherited by whoever wins. This puts “on a higher level (the North’s) technology of mounting nuclear warheads on ballistic rockets”.
“Owning nuclear weapons won’t ensure North Korea’s political security”, it said in an editorial.
That would make this test larger than the nuclear bomb dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War Two, which had an output of about 15 kilotonnes.
“The important thing is that five tests in, they now have a lot of nuclear test experience”.
Stephen Schwartz, an independent nuclear weapons expert, said that North Korea’s statement about the test suggested that the detonated nuclear device employed a composite fissile core that used both plutonium and highly enriched uranium, which, if true, would enable the North to build more nuclear weapons than would be otherwise possible with plutonium or uranium alone.
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North Korea is a very poor country and has much less to work with than, for instance, the United States and Soviet Union did in their nascent nuclear stages.
