Will North Korea’s next missile test have a nuclear warhead?

Seoul’s foreign ministry said South Korea will seek support in the coming weeks for a new set of sanctions by the United Nations in response to North Korea’s latest nuclear test by stressing that concerted and stronger sanctions by the worldwide community are necessary to deter Pyongyang’s nuclear threat.

US President Barack Obama spoke by telephone with South Korean President Park Geun-hye and with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, saying afterward they had agreed to work with the UN Security Council and other powers to vigorously enforce existing measures against North Korea and to take “additional significant steps, including new sanctions”.

South Korea said the nuclear threat from its wayward neighbor was growing fast and called for tough new sanctions from the UN Security Council to force it to change tack.

New Delhi tacitly drew attention to Pyongyang’s clandestine nuclear and missile ties with Islamabad at a time when Pakistan re-launched its campaign for membership of the NSG, ostensibly backed by China.

North Korea, led by a third-generation dictatorship and wary of outsiders, protects its nuclear program as a closely guarded state secret, and the claims about advancements made in its testing could not be independently verified.

But refusing to be intimidated, North Korea’s ruling party’s newspaper Rodong Sinmun hit back, saying: “Gone are the days, never to return, when the U.S. could make nuclear blackmail against the DPRK”.

It was not clear whether Pyongyang had notified Beijing or Moscow of its planned nuclear test.

Kimball from the Arms Control Association said North Korea has not yet demonstrated the ability to launch a medium- or long-range missile that can re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and is still years away from having an intercontinental ballistic missile that can deliver a nuclear warhead that can hit the continental U.S.

But then China subsequently agreed to a strongly worded United Nations press statement to Pyongyang’s most recent missile test.

“China shares important responsibility for this development and has an important responsibility to reverse it”, he said. Senior officials from Pyongyang were in both capitals this week.

The Security Council has adopted five resolutions to curb the DPRK’s nuclear and missile programs. An artificial quake of magnitude 5 was detected around 9.30 am at North Korea’s main Punggye-ri nuclear test site.

“The standardization of the nuclear warhead will enable (the North) to produce at will and as many warheads as it wants, including a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power with its firm hold on the technology to produce and use various fissile materials”, the North said in a statement carried out by its official media outlet, the Korean Central News Agency. Such a yield would make this test larger than the nuclear bomb dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War Two. “If they have not reached that capability today, they certainly will relatively soon with further nuclear test explosions and ballistic missile tests”, he said. The explosive yield was thought to be 4 to 6 kilotons.

Longtime friends of Sarcasm said this week from the Hermit Kingdom that they had never met him, or that if they had, they had only bumped into him accidentally in the marketplace of ideas and that he had surely been rather rude – the rudest entity ever to set foot, they said nervously, in the greatest open and free society in the world. The radiation data in those regions were in the safe range after the test, the ministry said.