Key China border city brushes off latest North Korea nuclear test

North Korea’s nuclear threat has grown significantly following its latest and largest nuclear test and a series of missile launches, analysts say, with some South Korean newspapers even theorising about an atomic attack on Seoul.

Before the closed-door UN Security Council meeting, US Ambassador Samantha Power said that “North Korea is seeking to ideal its nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles so they can hold the region and the world hostage under threat of nuclear strike”.

South Korea, the United States, Japan, Russia and China all condemned the blast at the Punggye-ri nuclear site, the North’s most powerful yet at 10 kilotons.

South Koreans watch a news program reporting about North Korea’s missile launch.

China, Pyongyang’s main diplomatic ally, is key in any effort to rein in North Korea’s nuclear programme.

U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said the council must use “every tool at its disposal” including new sanctions “to demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences for its unlawful and unsafe actions”.

“The cumulative knowledge of the five nuclear test explosions and the dozens of ballistic missile tests, especially in the last 12 months, are giving their technical people greater confidence that they can deploy warheads on their ballistic missiles”.

The South’s president also conceded that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is “uncontrollable” and highlighted the need for strengthening Seoul’s relationship with the US, which has almost 30,000 troops based on the peninsula already along with plans to further develop regional missile defense.

“We can’t assume that China is going to solve this for us”, Fitzpatrick said.

In a statement Friday, Obama condemned the North’s test and said it “follows an unprecedented campaign of ballistic missile launches, which North Korea claims are meant to serve as delivery vehicles meant to target the United States and our allies”.

“This is a critical moment to solve the crisis on the Korean Peninsula, so [I predict] the United Nations will adopt tougher sanctions against North Korea than ever before”, he said.

U.S. President Barack Obama said after speaking by telephone with South Korean President Park Geun-hye and with Japanese Prime Minister ShinzoAbe that they had agreed to work with the Security Council and other powers to vigorously enforce existing measures against North Korea and to take “additional significant steps, including new sanctions”. Artificial seismic waves measuring 3.9 were reported after North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006, for instance, and a 4.8 was reported from its fourth test this January.

The Pentagon did not have evidence that North Korea had been able to miniaturize a nuclear weapon, Pentagon spokesman Gary Ross said.

Clearly, the fear of walking into a nuclear war through North Korea’s aggressive weapons policy is not just Western hysteria.

There is little scientific evidence to verify that North Korea has perfected the science of creating a nuclear bomb small enough to fit on a ballistic missile, let alone to withstand the physics of atmospheric re-entry.

For Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist with the American Enterprise Institute and a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research, “There is a logic to the North Korean state, a deep and deadly serious logic”.

Seoul said the magnitude-5.0 seismic event dwarfs the four past quakes associated with North Korean nuclear tests.

Yun made the comments at a meeting to discuss the response to the North’s fifth, and biggest, nuclear test, conducted on Saturday.

“It has been described as maniacal by the South Korean president and it’s hard to disagree with that”.

Previous tests had been a stinging rebuke to pressure by Western governments and North Korea’s neighbors for Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons program.