The North said its latest test was in response to “US hostility”, while hailing its feat that it was now capable of mounting “nuclear warheads” on ballistic rockets.
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USA ambassador Samantha Power said the council must use “every tool at its disposal” including new sanctions “to demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences for its unlawful and risky actions”.
“The standardisation of the nuclear warhead will enable the DPRK to produce at will and as many as it wants a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power”, KCNA said, referring to the country’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
South Korea’s Park said Kim was showing “maniacal recklessness” in completely ignoring the world’s call to abandon his pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Gerard von Bohemen, New Zealand’s Ambassador to the United Nations, announced after presiding over an emergency meeting of the Security Council in NY on Friday “appropriate measures” aimed at Pyongyang were being developed. “Such provocation will eventually hasten its path to self-destruction”.
The test, which Pyongyang said was a “nuclear warhead explosion”, appeared to be North Korea’s biggest yet.
Global leaders condemned the attack, and analysts predicted that it would be years before the North possessed the technology to deliver a nuclear warhead on a missile.
Pyongyang said the test – the fifth one this year – was a response to the worldwide sanctions imposed against it and was meant to “counter U.S. hostility”. One of them was an LGBT event featuring Barbra Streisand.
“They’ve been demonstrating not just the ability to cause a nuclear detonation, but to mount it and turn it into a weapon”, said John Delury, an assistant professor of East Asian studies at Yonsei University in South Korea.
The Pentagon did not have evidence that North Korea had been able to miniaturize a nuclear weapon, Pentagon spokesman Gary Ross said. And a meeting between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader would be a radical departure from established practice and policy.
US President Barack Obama has warned North Korea’s actions present a “grave threat” and pledged to implement sanctions.
North Korea’s economy has been supported by China. It took two months of negotiations mainly between the US and China.
“Washington should state that if Pyongyang launches a nuclear-armed ballistic missile, the United States will respond with a full US attack on North Korea”, Auslin wrote.
“Our nuclear scientists staged a nuclear explosion test on a newly developed nuclear warhead at the country’s northern nuclear test site”, a TV announcer said.
“China will, along with the worldwide community, keep working toward the goal of denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula and commit to settling problems through the six-party talks”, it said in a statement.
After Pyongyang carried out its fourth nuclear test, the council in March adopted the toughest sanctions resolution to date targeting North Korea’s trade in minerals and tightening banking restrictions.
Zhang Liangui, a North Korea expert at the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China, said that Beijing would likely adopt any new sanctions that the United Nations made a decision to adopt against North Korea following the test. It is also to demonstrate a threat against the many sanctions that the country has experienced in the global community through the United Nations.
Lassina Zerbo, the head of world monitoring agency the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, said the seismic activity registered on Friday was larger than that triggered by the North’s test in January. Chinese leaders fear that instability in Pyongyang could precipitate a flood of refugees into northeastern China and push a US -friendly unified Korea right up to China’s doorstep. “They aren’t a backwards state any more”, Lewis said. “Furthermore, North Korea has also conducted a record level of ballistic missile tests this year, including an apparently successful test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile”, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Mac Thornberry said in a statement.
It added it would lodge a protest with the North Korean embassy in Beijing.
North Korea fired three missiles on Monday, September 5.
Malcolm Turnbull’s says North Korea is “provocative and dangerous”.
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The samples of the radioactive materials are reportedly expected to prove helpful in understanding the composition of nuclear substances used the in the reclusive country’s latest test and whether Pyongyang used highly enriched uranium.
