Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images
People watched a television
broadcast reporting on North Korea’s nuclear test at a railway station
station in Seoul, South Korea, on Tuesday.
By DAVID E. SANGER and CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: February 12, 2013
WASHINGTON — North Korea
confirmed on Tuesday that it had conducted its third, long-threatened
nuclear test, according to the official K.C.N.A. news service, posing a
new challenge for the Obama administration in its effort to keep the
country from becoming a full-fledged nuclear power.
The K.C.N.A. said the North used a “miniaturized and lighter nuclear
device with greater explosive force than previously” and that the test
“did not pose any negative impact on the surrounding ecological
environment.”
Early Tuesday morning in Washington the office of the director of
national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., issued a statement
suggesting the North Koreans were, on their third try, beginning to
produce nuclear devices with substantial explosive power. “The explosion
yield was approximately several kilotons,” the announcement said, which
was less specific than a South Korean Defense Ministry estimate of six
to seven kilotons. That would be far greater than the yield of less than
one kiloton detected in the North’s 2006 test, but it is unclear how it
would measure up to the last test, in 2009, which had estimated yield
of two to six kilotons. By comparison, the first bomb the United States
dropped on Japan, which devastated Hiroshima in 1945, had an explosive
yield of 15 kilotons.
The test drew a crescendo of international condemnation Tuesday, with President Obama
calling it a “highly provocative act” that demands “swift and credible
action by the international community” against North Korea. Russia,
Britain, South Korea and the United Nations also quickly condemned the
blast. The head of the international nuclear watchdog called the test
“deeply regrettable” and the United Nations Security Council scheduled an emergency meeting at 9 a.m. in New York to take up the matter.
Preliminary estimates by South Korea suggested that the test was much more powerful than the previous two conducted by the North.
The test is the first under the country’s new leader, Kim Jong-un,
and an open act of defiance to the Chinese, who had urged Mr. Kim not
to risk open confrontation by setting off the weapon. In a relatively
muted statement issued several hours after the blast, China expressed
its “staunch opposition” to the test but called for “all parties
concerned to respond calmly.” And it was unclear how China would act at the Security Council meeting on Tuesday.
The nuclear test, came the same day Mr. Obama is to use his State of the Union address
to call for drastically reducing nuclear arms around the world,
potentially bringing the number of deployed American weapons to roughly
1,000 from the current 1,700.
Even before the North conducted Tuesday’s test, the Obama administration
had already threatened to take additional action to penalize the
country through the United Nations. But the fact is that there are few
sanctions left to apply against the most unpredictable country in Asia.
The only penalty that would truly hurt the North would be a cutoff of
oil and other aid from China. And until now, despite issuing warnings,
the Chinese have feared instability and chaos in the North more than its
growing nuclear and missile capability, and the Chinese leadership has
refused to participate in sanctions.
Mr. Kim, believed to be about 29, appears to be betting that even a
third test would not change the Chinese calculus, and later Tuesday, the
North Korean Foreign Ministry warned of “second and third measures of
greater intensity” if Washington remains hostile.
The test set off a scramble among Washington’s Asian allies to assess what the North Koreans had done.
The United States sent aloft aircraft equipped with delicate sensors
that may, depending on the winds, be able to determine whether it was a
plutonium or uranium weapon. The Japanese defense minister, Itsunori
Onodera, said Japan had ordered the dispatch of an Air Self-Defense
Force jet to monitor for radioactivity in Japanese airspace.
Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, told Parliament that the country
was considering “its own actions, including sanctions, to resolve this
and other issues.”
But the threat may be largely empty, because trade is limited and the
United States and its allies have refrained from a naval blockade of
North Korea or other steps that could revive open conflict, which has
been avoided on the Korean Peninsula since an armistice was declared 60
years ago.
It may take days or weeks to determine independently if the test, was
successful. American officials will also be looking for signs of whether
the North, for the first time, conducted a test of a uranium weapon,
based on a uranium enrichment capability it has been pursuing for a
decade. The past two tests used plutonium, reprocessed from one of the
country’s now-defunct nuclear reactors. While the country has only
enough plutonium for a half-dozen or so bombs, it can produce enriched
uranium well into the future.
