After these intense expressions of concern, the question is what the United States and its allies will do to deter a North Korean regime that, under President Kim Jong Un, keeps upping the stakes in its nuclear brinkmanship.
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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.
North Korea claims to have tested a hydrogen bomb, though the USA and others weren’t so sure.
North Korea conducted its fifth and biggest nuclear test yesterday and said it had mastered the ability to mount a warhead on a ballistic missile, ratcheting up a threat that its rivals and the United Nations have been powerless to contain.
North Korea has also been angered by a United States and South Korean plan to install an anti-missile defence system in the South and by the allies’ massive annual joint military exercises, which are still taking place. Monday’s multiple launches followed a test on August 3 of a single missile that also landed within the Japanese zones.
The United Nations Security Council meets behind closed doors on Friday to discuss condemning North Korea’s latest nuclear test and whether the 15-member body should punish the reclusive state with more sanctions, diplomats said.
In addition to all these missiles, there are recent reports that North Korea is testing firing ballistic missiles from a submarine.
“My deep fear is that they will launch a live nuclear weapon on one of their missiles”, Hanham said.
However, the test reflected the country’s desire to advance its weapons program in defiance of the global community and its closest regional ally, China.
How should the world respond?
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.
Christopher Hill, the former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, said Friday it’s time to stop guessing about North Korea’s capabilities and start planning a response.
North Korea next tested a nuclear weapon in 2009, again in early 2013, and yet again early this year, establishing a pattern of one test around every three years.
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un reacts as the Supreme People’s Assembly is convened on June 29, in Pyongyang, North Korea. “I don’t put it past them to threaten countries and suggest that they will be prepared to launch a nuclear strike”.
“With a unified approach, and if leveraging sanctions is part of that approach, I think there could still be an option to try to slow and try to roll back North Korea’s nuclear capabilities”, Kelsey Davenport, the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, told Mashable.
Philip Yun, executive director of the Ploughshares Fund, an organization that aims to eliminate nuclear weapons, also said the world can not delay a response to North Korea’s testing.
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The strength of this test, and the speed with which North Korea was able to perform it so soon after the test earlier this year, indicate that the nation’s nuclear program is becoming more efficient, according to experts on the country.
