South Korea also emphasised the need for fresh countermeasures including a new United Nations security council resolution, the South Korean foreign ministry said in a statement.
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South Korea’s military put the force of Friday’s blast at 10 kilotonnes, but a U.S. expert said the highest estimates of seismic magnitude suggested a yield of 20 to 30 kilotonnes.
Shortly after the North’s test, South Korea’s leading military intelligence officer Kim Hwang Rok said North Korea has two or three unused tunnels at the Punggy-ri test site where it can conduct an additional test if it wants.
North Korea also demanded that the USA recognise it is a “legitimate nuclear weapons state”, and defended the latest nuclear weapons test as a necessary response to what he termed a U.S. nuclear threat.
The UN Security Council agreed Friday to start work on new punitive measures – even though five sets of UN sanctions since the first nuclear test have failed to halt the North’s nuclear drive.
Yonhap News Agency reports that the government of Kim Jong-un has completed preparations for its second nuclear test in a matter of days according to South Korean government sources who believe that Pyongyang plans to employ a previously unused tunnel at its mountainous testing site.
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 U.N. Security Council is strongly condemning North Korea’s l.
But Kristensen said what is missing is an open US intelligence estimate of North Korea’s program.
Those districts which are thought to be hiding the leadership would be particularly targeted and the city “will be reduced to ashes and removed from the map”.
Pyongyang responded on Sunday by calling the threats of “meaningless sanctions. highly laughable”.
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”.
Hwang said during a meeting that North Korea’s “fanatical development of nuclear arms and missiles would become the poison that would hasten the destruction of its regime rather than consolidate it”.
“North Korea has a tunnel where it can conduct an additional nuclear test”.
The UN has adopted five rounds of crippling sanctions on the North since it first tested an atomic device in 2006 despite the nation’s critical situation, including its worsening starvation.
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“We had to choose the path of a nuclear power state”, Rodong Sinmun said.
