Hours after the test, South Korean officials scrambled together an emergency meeting.
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(Yoshinobu Shimizu/Kyodo News via AP).
At the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China, last week, China’s President Xi Jinping confronted South Korean President Park Geun-hye about the missiles the US had supplied.
Ryoo Yong-gyu, quake and Volcano Monitoring Division Director, shows the seismic waves that came after the test, during a media briefing at Korea Meteorological Administration in Seoul on Friday.
“Our nuclear scientists staged a nuclear explosion test on a newly developed nuclear warhead at the country’s northern nuclear test site”, a North Korean TV presenter said.
The US National Security Council said it was aware of seismic activity in the region of the test site and was “monitoring and continuing to assess the situation in close coordination with our regional partners”.
He called the North Korean test destabilizing and provocative.
Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the test from Geneva, where he’s trying to focus on the Syria crisis, saying he was confident that North Korea’s key ally China, and Russian Federation, shared the “concerns”, of the United States, but added that “we’re trying still to monitor to see precisely what took place”.
Using the country’s full, formal name – Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) – Ri said the test confirmed the country was capable of producing a nuclear warhead that could be mounted on strategic ballistic missiles.
At an estimated 10 kilotons, it’s thought to be the most powerful explosion yet.
All sides can agree on the need for strong condemnation, and the undesirability of a nuclear-armed Kim Jong-Un – and there will likely now be another firmly worded UN Security Council resolution.
So China’s leadership may be prepared to push the Kim regime a little further, but not right over the edge.
The United States called on China to put pressure on North Korea to end its nuclear programme after Pongyang conducted its fifth and biggest nuclear test.
“The United States condemns North Korea’s September 9 nuclear test in the strongest possible terms as a grave threat to regional security and to global peace and stability”, he said.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga described North Korea as an “outlaw nation in the neighborhood”, according to the AP.
If this is the case, it will be North Korea’s most powerful nuclear test yet making it 5 kilotonnes shy of the hydrogen bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
But verifying the claim to have created a weapon-tipped missile will be hard, said Melissa Hanham, a North Korea expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. The agency’s report cited an unidentified government official.
Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike told reporters the city was testing water samples and monitoring radiation levels to gauge any impact from the test in Japan.
In the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, residents praised the test.
Kerry says the U.S.is still trying to determine precisely what happened.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported a 5.3 magnitude natural disaster in North Korea, but later termed it an explosion.
Obama’s written statement, released by the White House Friday morning, contained some of Obama’s most blunt language on the North Korean nuclear program to date. Not only has the range of the weapons jumped significantly, but the country is working to flawless new platforms for launching them – submarines and mobile launchers – giving the North greater ability to threaten the tens of thousands of USA troops stationed throughout Asia.
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Earlier this week, North Korea fired three ballistic missiles into Japan’s exclusive economic zone in the Sea of Japan in an apparent signal of its displeasure with Group of 20 summit talks being held in Hangzhou, China.
