North Korea test of hydrogen bomb heightens Kim Jong Un's threats

North Korea's words & actions continue to be very hostile and dangerous to the United States: Trump

North Korea said it successfully tested a hydrogen bomb with “unprecedentedly big power” that can be loaded onto an intercontinental ballistic missile, a significant escalation of its threats to strike the US.

Sunday’s test, North Korea’s first since US President Donald Trump took office, was a “perfect success” and confirmed the precision and technology of the bomb, according to the Korean Central News Agency. Energy from the explosion, near the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in northeast North Korea, was about six times stronger than the nuclear test of last September, South Korea’s weather agency said.

“It’s big —an order of magnitude bigger than anything else we’ve seen the North Koreans explode,” Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California, said of the latest test. “A larger weapon can obviously wreak more destruction. But I think there is also a political aspect -the North Koreans want an arsenal as modern as anyone else.”

Trump said in a series of Twitter messages that North Korea’s “words and actions continue to be very hostile and dangerous to the United States.” While stopping short of his warnings last month of “fire and fury” if the regime keeps threatening the US, he added, “South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!”

The US administration will draft a new set of sanctions, seeking to stop companies that work with North Korea from doing business with American firms, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I am going to draft a sanctions package to send to the president for his strong consideration that anybody that wants to do trade or business with them would be prevented from doing trade or business with us,” Mnuchin said. “People need to cut off North Korea economically. This is unacceptable behaviour.”

“All options are on the table,” Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono said on public broadcaster NHK.

Still, while South Korean President Moon Jae-in said in a statement that he was furious about the test, he also urged North Korea to agree to negotiations. 

China’s foreign ministry issued a statement condemning the nuclear test. “China urges North Korea to abide by Security Council resolutions, stop taking actions that will worsen the situation and at the same time won’t benefit its own interests, and to return to the path of dialogue to solve the problem,” it said.

Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to deal “appropriately” with the test and to stick to the goal of denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Bloomberg