The United Nations has strongly condemned North Korea’s fifth and most powerful nuclear test to date, agreeing immediately to draw up significant new sanctions. The United States, Britain and France pushed the 15-member body to impose new sanctions.
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“We insist that the North Korean side end its risky and reckless misadventures, comply in good faith with all UN Security Council directives, completely abandon its nuclear missile programmes and return to the NPT regime”.
Clinton said the United States would not let North Korea pursue a nuclear weapon and said that as president, she would seek new sanctions in addition to those endorsed by the Obama administration and adopted earlier in the year with the United Nations.
Obama claims that “serious consequences” will result from North Korea’s “flagrant violation” of UN Security Council Resolutions banning nuclear weapons. French envoy to the François Delattre said the latest nuclear test by North Korea is more than a grave provocation.
Under 32-year-old leader Kim Jong Un, North Korea has accelerated the development of its nuclear and missile programmes, despite UN sanctions that were tightened in March and have further isolated the impoverished country.
South Korea earlier accused the North’s leader Kim Jong-un of “maniacal recklessness”.
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.
North Korea has offered a chilling demonstration over the past month of its ability to deliver such warheads, using missiles that could strike Japan, South Korea and even US territory.
Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. had repeatedly offered talks to North Korea, but Pyongyang had to accept de-nuclearization, which it had refused to do.
Pyongyang’s state media said on Friday the nuclear test had realized the country’s goal of being able to fit a miniaturized warhead on a rocket. According to the Japanese account of the conversation, Abe told Obama that Japan viewed the North Korean test as a “grave threat” to its security and a flagrant violation of United Nations sanctions.
It said it would lodge a protest with the North Korean embassy in Beijing.
Pyongyang’s most impressive missile test was a launch Monday in rapid succession of three intermediate-range missiles toward Japan.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein also designated two independent human rights experts to support the work of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in North Korea Tomas Ojea Quintana.
“North Korea poses a threat to the region and poses a threat to the kind of stable border relationship that China has always valued with North Korea”, she said.
It condemned January’s test and repeated that on Friday after the latest.
Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation CTBTO Executive Secretary Lassina Zerbo called the tests a frightening, unfortunate and serious breach of the norms adopted by the worldwide community. But North Korea has shrugged off all sanctions to date, and can be expected to continue.
“The important thing is, that five tests in, they now have a lot of nuclear test experience”.
“Now watching all these long, longstanding crises in Colombia and Cyprus are now coming closer to a resolution, I feel much more sorry and regretful that something which is relating to my own home country is not happening – even getting more and more hard situation”, Ban said.
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The Pentagon said it would deploy the U.S. Air Force WC-135, a modified Boeing aircraft, to collect air particles and any debris in the atmosphere and confirm the nature of the test.
