North Korea has violated five United Nations nuclear sanctions, including trade and banking restrictions, which have been imposed on the country since it detonated its first nuclear device in 2006.
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The North carried out its fifth nuclear test on Friday, claiming that it had successfully tested a nuclear warhead, and drawing global condemnation.
“To be clear, the United States does not, and never will, accept North Korea as a nuclear state”, Obama said in a later statement.
Under the 32-year-old third-generation leader Kim, North Korea has sped up development of its nuclear and missile programmes, despite United Nations sanctions that were tightened in March and have further isolated the impoverished country.
China’s environment ministry began emergency radiation monitoring along its northeastern border with North Korea, the state broadcaster CCTV reported on its official Sina Weibo microblog. The ministry also quoted him as saying that Beijing stands firm on denuclearization, peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea conducted its fifth nuclear test Friday, and all signs point to a weapons program of steadily increasing sophistication and power.
North Korea confirmed on Friday that it had carried out a nuclear test in the country’s northeast.
Stephen Schwartz, an independent nuclear weapons expert, said that North Korea’s statement about the test suggested that the detonated nuclear device employed a composite fissile core that used both plutonium and highly-enriched uranium, which, if true, would enable the North to build more nuclear weapons than would be otherwise possible with plutonium or uranium alone.
The U.S. and its allies have long struggled to contain North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
The test was announced hours after the U.S. Geological Survey detected a magnitude 5.3 natural disaster in the hermetic nation’s northeast test site – a reading that exceeded those recorded after previous nuke tests.
“Gone are the days, never to return, when the USA could make unilateral nuclear blackmail against the DPRK”, it added, using the abbreviation for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the country’s official title.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter called for further pressure on North Korea, but said China bore responsibility for tackling the problem.
“The US is exasperated by the strong military steps being taken by the DPRK”. It took two months of negotiations mainly between the USA and China.
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Over that same period, the military has launched an unprecedented 21 ballistic missile launches – more than four times as many as North Korea had ever fired previously. That could still mean North Korea is much closer than we thought to mounting a nuclear weapon onto a medium-range missile – but, as always, there’s a disquieting amount of guesswork we have to do here.
