South Korea joins WMD mission as nuclear test outrage grows
South Korea said today it would join a US-led initiative to intercept ships suspected of spreading weapons of mass destruction, as the United Nations swiftly condemned North Korea for testing a powerful nuclear bomb.
And in a further sign of the North’s mounting stand-off with the world, a report said the country was probably preparing to fire short-range missiles today off its western coast.
The UN Security Council said the test was a “clear violation” of a 2006 resolution banning North Korea from conducting nuclear development, and that it would start work today on a new resolution that could result in even stronger measures.
Russian officials said the nuclear bomb that the North detonated underground yesterday was comparable to those that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, raising fears that the communist country could spread such technology abroad.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, citing a defence source it did not identify, said North Korea banned ships from waters off its western coast and would probably fire short-range missiles as early as today. Yonhap said yesterday that the North fired short-range missiles off its eastern coast.
US president Barack Obama told South Korean president Lee Myung-bak that the United States would protect his country from any possible North Korean aggression and called for a “strong resolution” by the UN, Mr Lee’s spokesman Lee Dong-kwan said after the two leaders spoke by telephone.
South Korea, which previously stayed out of the US-led Proliferation Security Initiative in order to pursue reconciliation efforts with North Korea, set aside its reservations and announced it would join the pact immediately.
The programme involves stopping and searching ships suspected of carrying nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, materials to make them, or missiles to deliver them.
North Korea has previously warned the South that joining the programme would be considered an act of war.
Earlier, Mr Obama had criticised Pyongyang’s “blatant defiance” of existing resolutions and 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.
Today, North Korea accused the US of hostility and said its army and people were ready to defeat an American invasion, accusing Mr Obama of attempting to “militarily stifle” the communist country.
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 has raised the stakes in the mounting stand-off over its nuclear programme.
Last month North Korea launched a rocket despite international calls for restraint, abandoned international nuclear negotiations, restarted its nuclear plants and warned it would carry out the atomic and long-range missile tests.
The rise in tensions comes amid speculation about who will succeed North Korea’s authoritarian leader, 67-year-old Kim Jong Il, who is believed to have suffered a stroke last August.
Kim, who inherited the leadership from his father in 1994 and rules the nation of 24 million with an iron fist, has three sons but has not publicly named a successor.
Though desperately poor, North Korea has increasingly turned inward. With last month’s controversial rocket launch and yesterday’s nuclear test, Kim clearly wants to show that the nation remains strong, analysts say.
