Confirming its fifth test, Pyongyang pledged to “continue measures to qualitatively and quantitatively strengthen the nation’s nuclear forces”. Japan and the USA have dispatched jets to test for radiation. South Korea believes Kim Jong Un is preparing to hit the button on another test. The U.N. Security Council is strongly condemning North Korea’s l.
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North Korea is capable of detonating another nuclear device at any time at the country’s main test site, South Korea has said, three days after Pyongyang carried out its fifth atomic bomb explosion.
The North also boasted that the test was of a nuclear warhead that could be mounted on a missile.
“An additional test could be conducted in a tunnel that branches off from the second tunnel or in the third tunnel, where preparations have been completed”, South Koreas’s Defence Ministry spokesman Moon Sang-Gyun said.
The spokesman defended the test as a necessary response to what he described as “augmented threats of nuclear war from the United States”.
South Korea has a plan to annihilate the North Korean capital if it shows any signs of mounting a nuclear attack, the South’s Yonhap news agency reports. Yonhap did not elaborate.
With ripples from North Korea’s latest nuclear test continuing to spread throughout the region, speculation surfaced Monday that the communist state may be gearing up to detonate another fission device in defiance of worldwide condemnation.
President Park Geun-hye has already rejected the suggestion as contrary to the South’s own global obligations.
It said the U.S. was “the root cause” of the issue.
South Korea’s military put the force of Friday’s blast at 10 kilotonnes, which would be the North’s most powerful blast to date, but a USA expert said the highest estimates of seismic magnitude suggested a yield of 20 to 30 kilotonnes.
WASHINGTON (Tribune News Service) – Tremors that emanated Friday from North Korea’s northeastern nuclear test site alerted the world to another crucial step that the isolated nation had made in its defiant, decadelong march to develop long-range missiles tipped with lightweight nuclear warheads.
The claim reported by Reuters comes from an American military official in South Korea.
“North Korea has a tunnel where it can conduct an additional nuclear test”, Moon said.
Although, North Korea has already responded by saying the thought of receiving another sanction is “laughable”.
Jeffrey Lewis, of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Calif., said the possession of a significant number of nuclear weapons could allow the North to strike ports and airfields to prevent the USA from amassing forces in the event of a war.
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North Korea’s pursuit of missiles and nuclear weapons is one of the most intractable foreign policy problems for the USA and South Korea. The United States, Britain and France – three of the five veto-wielding permanent members – have pushed for the 15-member body to impose new sanctions.
