World leaders worried after Pyongyang's blatant defiance
World leaders worried after Pyongyang's "blatant defiance"North Korea defied world powers and carried out an underground test yesterday of a nuclear bomb Russian officials said was comparable to those that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The incident set the communist regime up for a showdown with the United Nations.
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How it happened: An official maps the seismic waves after North Korea's nuclear test, whichu00a0 was measured in South Korea (bottom) in Seoul yesterday. pic/ap |
The UN Security Council was to meet yesterday in New York to discuss what US President Barack Obama called Pyongyang's "blatant defiance" of resolutions banning the regime from developing weapons of mass destruction. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned the test as a "danger to the world". Russia's Foreign Ministry called it "a serious blow to international efforts" to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
New sanctions
French officials said they would push for new sanctions, and even traditional Pyongyang ally China said it was "resolutely opposed" to the test, which Russian officials estimated yielded a powerful 10 to 20-kiloton blast enough to flatten a city and far more than North Korea managed in a 2006 atomic test.
Pyongyang's unprecedented defiance raises the stakes in the mounting standoff over its nuclear programme.
Last month, Pyongyang launched a rocket despite international calls for restraint, abandoned international nuclear negotiations, restarted its nuclear plants and warned it would carry out atomic and long-range missile tests.
Pyongyang is believed to have enough weaponised plutonium for at least a half-dozen atomic bombs. However, experts say scientists have not yet mastered the miniaturisation needed to mount a nuclear device onto a long-range missile.
