Friday’s underground explosion as well as the previous three rounds occurred in the second of the three tunnels installed at the North’s Yongbyon nuclear complex in the northwest town of Punggye, leaving the others ready for additional blasts, Seoul’s Defense Ministry said.
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On Friday, South Korea’s top military intelligence officer, Kim Hwang Rok, said that North Korea has two or three unused tunnels in the Punggy-ri site where it can conduct an additional test if it wants.
Following the North’s nuclear test, Obama said he had spoken to the South Korean and Japanese leaders and agreed to work with the Security Council to enforce existing measures.
On Saturday, South Korea foreign minister Yun Byung-se said the North’s nuclear capability appeared to be developing fast.
Sung Kim, the USA special envoy to North Korea said the UN Security Council along with Japan, South Korea and the United States are examining additional unilateral measures.
South Korea’s defence ministry has now warned that Kim may launch a new nuclear test at any moment. But they center on a technological mystery that has long bedeviled outside experts: How far has North Korea gotten in efforts to consistently shrink down nuclear warheads so they can fit on long-range missiles?
The South Korean military official told Yonhap that Pyongyang districts thought to be hiding the North’s leadership would be particularly targeted in any attack.
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”.
China, regarded as North Korea’s only ally, could be pressed to take the strongest possible action by blocking the transportation of fuel and oil but that could have grave consequences for the general population. The city, the source said, “will be reduced to ashes and removed from the map”.
A push for further sanctions was “laughable”, North Korea said on Sunday, vowing to continue to strengthen its nuclear power.
The UK, US and France pushed for the 15-member body to impose new sanctions.
The Global Times, run by the Chinese Communist Party, rejected the suggestion by the United States that Beijing was responsible for the North’s pursuit of nuclear arms.
But bad weather Monday also delayed a USA plan for at least 24 hours to send warplanes from Guam to South Korea, as it has done in the past after major provocations by North Korea. Park said Monday the “danger of war” and a possibility of North Korean provocations could loom on the Korean Peninsula. The statement comes days after Pyongyang conducted its fifth and, what is believed to be, their most powerful nuclear test.
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But Adam Mount, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for American Progress, said China has more leverage, and more reason to act, than its officials sometimes make it seem publicly.
