Citing commercial satellite imagery from September 15, the US-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies said Friday that Pyongyang may detonate further devices at the unused tunnels at its Punggye-ri complex, echoing the South Korean military’s assessment days earlier.
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But threatening World War 3 rhetoric has been used by North Korea before on several occasions.
In the wake of North Korea’s latest nuclear test, a panel of experts discussed the possible implications of a nuclear weapons “no-first-use” policy on global security at the Heritage Foundation on Thursday.
This test marks one more step toward the day when no one will be able to believe that the problem can be managed with another round of sanctions.
But Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University and an authority on the North Korean leadership, believes there may be an element of bluff in the statements emerging from Pyongyang.
Who says North Korea doesn’t have a sense of humour? Our party proposes progressive and proportional conventional and nuclear disarmament, while denouncing today’s exhausted formal democracies and the violence of military dictatorships.
Though we empathize for the innocent North Korean people, it’s hard to feel generous toward a nation which has spent all of its money trying to obtain nuclear weapons so that it may threaten the USA and other civilized nations.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, “We have made overture after overture to the dictator of North Korea”.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said in April that North Korea’s chronic food shortages were expected to worsen, due to tight food supplies last year and this year when “most households were already estimated to have poor or borderline food consumption levels”.
Publicly, China has not linked the THAAD deployment with whether it will support sanctions on North Korea.
The North Korean foreign ministry stated: “We will continue to take measures for increasing the nuclear force of the country in quality and in quantity to safeguard the dignity and the right to existence of the DPRK and ensure genuine peace from the USA increasing threat of nuclear war”.
North Korea said its goal is to deter an attack from the United States by developing a nuclear weapon on a long-range missile that could reach USA territory.
On Sept. 9, North Korea violated worldwide sanctions by conducting its fifth underground nuclear test, apparently its most powerful to date, and some experts say another test explosion may well be in the works.
A collapse in North Korea, sending a flood of refugees across the relatively porous border into China’s rustbelt north-eastern provinces, would also be deeply destabilising to Beijing’s rule as well as a huge economic cost.
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He said it’s urgent that the council unite, “show firm resolve” and commitment, and not lose time in sending a strong message to the authorities in Pyongyang that their nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches are unacceptable and must stop. Last week’s nuclear test have reinforced fears in Washington and across Asia that Pyongyang’s military advances could soon outpace the missile defence systems the U.S. and its regional allies have built up over the last decade.
