It is easy to dismiss North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, as a loony tunes villain in an isolated, far-flung country – as his cartoonish antics defy the boundaries of parody – but the latest display of military self-awareness through his fifth and most powerful atomic weapons test is creating waves far beyond Friday’s seismic activity on the Korean peninsula.
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In Seoul, dozens of protesters burned an effigy of the North’s leader Kim Jong-Un and North Korean flags and called for “strong retaliation”, including pre-emptive attacks on the North’s nuclear complex. “The 10-kiloton blast was almost twice the [power of the] fourth nuclear test and slightly less than the Hiroshima bombing, which was measured about 15 kilotons”, said Kim Nam-Wook of the South’s meteorological agency.
“If previous tests were conducted with the objective of acquiring the nuclear bomb, the newest test shows that the North finally owns a real, weaponized nuclear bomb”, Kim said.
“We are not going to let North Korea pursue a nuclear weapon with the ballistic missile capacity to deliver it to United States territory”, Clinton said.
The decision was taken at an urgent meeting of the 15-member council.
“In line with this commitment and the gravity of this violation, the members of the Security Council will begin to work immediately on appropriate measures”, they said.
British U.N. Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said there were a series of steps the Security Council could take to respond to Friday’s nuclear test and that Britain would like to see a combination of those steps imposed.
US President Barack Obama had earlier declared to push for new worldwide sanctions in retaliation for the “grave threat” posed by North Korea’s test.
“This is more than brazen defiance”, Ms Power told reporters at the United Nations headquarters.
South Korea’s foreign minister said on Saturday that North Korea’s nuclear capability is expanding fast, echoing alarm around the world over the isolated state’sfifth nuclear test carried out in defiance of United Nations sanctions.
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.
After the meeting China’s Ambassador Liu Jieyi sidestepped questions about Beijing’s support for sanctions.
The 15-member powerful United Nations body held urgent consultations here yesterday to address the “serious situation” arising from Korea’s atomic test – believed to be its most powerful ever.
Obama held unscheduled meetings with Park and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe after the missile tests and said Washington needed to maintain a sense of urgency within the worldwide community on sanctions against Pyongyang. It took two months of negotiations mainly between the US and China. And they say that it won’t be long before a President Clinton or President Trump is forced to confront the issue and its impact on Asia.
It may indicate North Korea feels it can confidently build miniaturized warheads, mass-produce those weapons and then deploy them on ballistic missiles.
The North has previously made claims on “miniaturised” nuclear warheads but they have never been independently confirmed.
“It shows once more that North Korea continues to develop its nuclear program, alongside its ballistic missile program”.
Obama has refused to negotiate with the North unless it agrees first that the ultimate objective of any talks would be a Korean Peninsula without nuclear arms.
Obama condemned the nuclear test “in the strongest possible terms as a grave threat to regional security”.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also strongly condemned the underground nuclear test and said, “This is yet another brazen breach of the resolutions of the Security Council”.
The explosion had a yield of 10 kilotonnes, according to experts.
But Pyongyang also has a highly enriched uranium program, which is much more easily concealed and which outsiders know very little about; if that program is advanced, the North could have much more fuel for bomb-building.
The nuclear test was detected by the U.S. Geological Survey, who reported an explosion causing a seismic event at 8:30 p.m.
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After its fourth test in March, sanctions were toughened to include North Korea’s mineral trade and stricter banking restrictions. Such a yield would make this test larger than the nuclear bomb dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War Two and potentially bigger than that dropped on Nagasaki soon after. Not only has the range of the weapons jumped significantly, but the country is working to ideal new platforms for launching them – submarines and mobile launchers – giving the North greater ability to threaten the tens of thousands of US troops stationed throughout Asia.
