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.
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“The South Korean and United States intelligence communities assess that North Korea is prepared for further nuclear tests in the Punggye region”, ministry spokesperson Moon Sang-gyun said at a news briefing.
South Korean shout slogans during a rally denouncing North Korea’s latest nuclear test in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Sept. 12, 2016.
The North also boasted that the test was of a nuclear warhead that could be mounted on a missile.
Pyongyang’s assertions that it is able to miniaturize a nuclear warhead have never been independently verified.
North Korea’s pursuit of missiles and nuclear weapons is one of the most intractable foreign policy problems for the USA and South Korea.
Bad weather Monday delayed for at least 24 hours a US plan to send warplanes from Guam to South Korea, as it has done after past provocations by North Korea.
The UN Security Council said it would begin work on a new resolution to stop Pyongyang’s nuclear program. The United States has about 28,500 troops in South Korea.
On Monday, Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported that North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho had arrived in Beijing.
“The North has completed preparations to conduct a nuclear test at any time in the third tunnel that has not been used previously”, an unnamed official told Yonhap.
A USA special envoy for the isolated state, Sung Kim, will travel to Seoul on Monday.
North Korea’s pursuit of missiles and nuclear weapons is one of the most intractable foreign policy problems for the US and South Korea.
South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye said Kim was “mentally out of control”, blind to all the warnings of foreign powers and “the patience of the worldwide community has come to the limit”.
A group of 31 South Korean conservative lawmakers said the country should have nuclear weapons, either by acquiring its own arms or asking the Americans to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons that were withdrawn from the South under a 1991 pact for the denuclearization of the peninsula.
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Emboldened by recent technical progress, the Kim Jong-un regime may push for the fresh launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching U.S. mainland, possibly in time for the October 10 anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers’ Party or the USA presidential election slated for November 8, observers say.
