“North Korea’s nuclear capability is growing and speeding to a considerable level, considering the fifth nuclear test was the strongest in scale and the interval has quickened substantially”, Yun told a ministry meeting convened to discuss the test.
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North Korea’s nuclear program has accompanied a series of ballistic missile launches, the latest of which took place on Monday as world powers gathered for a G20 meeting in China.
But the country has dramatically accelerated its nuclear and missile programs since Kim Jong Un became North Korea’s third-generation leader nearly five years ago, conducting three of its five nuclear tests in that time. President Barack Obama condemned the test and said the United States would never accept the country as a nuclear power. Eastern Time 12 miles from Sungjibaegam, North Korea.
“The important thing is, that five tests in, they now have a lot of nuclear test experience”.
The press statement agreed upon by all 15 Security Council members late Friday said diplomats will draft a new resolution in response to its earlier promise to take “further significant measures”, if the North continued to defy the global community. The measures will be under Article 41 of the U.N. Charter, which specifies non-military actions including sanctions, it said.
She added: “We will take additional significant steps, including new sanctions to demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to its unlawful and risky actions”.
“This is more than brazen defiance”, Power told reporters at United Nations headquarters.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, provided a similar assessment, saying that North Korea is either at or very close to the point where they can arm short-range ballistic missiles with a nuclear warhead.
What measures are included in a new resolution will largely depend on China, the North’s major ally and neighbor which fears any instability on the Korean peninsula.
Moscow urged all parties concerned to refrain from steps that could lead to further escalation of tensions, and confirmed its readiness for a “very tight coordination of steps aiming to elaborate an worldwide response to Pyongyang’s provocative actions”, said the statement. “We must urgently break this accelerating spiral of escalation”.
Work on that resolution took two months, with the United States engaged directly with China on the sweeping measures.
“We believe new sanctions are indispensable”, French Ambassador Francois Delattre said.
The so-called six-party talks aimed at ending the North’s nuclear programme involving the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea, China, and North Korea have been defunct since 2008.
“The standardization of the nuclear warhead will enable (North Korea) to produce at will and as many as it wants a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power”, North Korea said. This puts “on a higher level (the North’s) technology of mounting nuclear warheads on ballistic rockets”.
South Koreans watch a news program reporting about North Korea’s missile launch.
South Korea’s main spy agency told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing after the test that it does not think North Korea now has the ability to develop nuclear weapons that can be mounted on ballistic missiles, but intelligence officials expressed worries that the North’s efforts to do so are progressing more quickly than previously thought, said Kim Byungkee, a lawmaker from the opposition Minjoo Party.
Karl Dewey from IHS Jane’s explains that the explosive artifact tested by Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea is “smaller than both Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but it would still rip the heart out of a city”.
The RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally-funded USA think tank, said in a 2010 report that the detonation of a 10-kilton nuclear weapon in the South Korean capital of Seoul could cause more than 200,000 deaths and would easily overwhelm doctors and beds in hospitals throughout the country.
Obama condemned the nuclear test “in the strongest possible terms as a grave threat to regional security”.
The Pentagon did not have evidence that North Korea had been able to miniaturize a nuclear weapon, Pentagon spokesman Gary Ross said.
U.N. Security Council Resolution 2270, which was passed in March after the North’s fourth nuclear test, provided a loophole allowing imports of North Korean coal if such transactions are exclusively for the North’s “livelihood” and will not yield revenue for its nuclear, ballistic missile or other restricted programs.
The test proved North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was unwilling to alter course and tougher sanctions and pressure were needed to apply “unbearable pain on the North to leave no choice but to change”, South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se said.
North Korea, which labels the South and the United States as its main enemies, said its “scientists and technicians carried out a nuclear explosion test for the judgment of the power of a nuclear warhead”, according to its official KCNA news agency. The North’s fourth test, in January, was an estimated six kilotons.
North Korea said no radioactive material leaked, but the explosion put the region on edge.
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The North Korean state-run television made the announcement early Friday, making the test the fifth of its kind in the country.
