SEOUL, South Korea — President Barack Obama and the United Nations separately condemned North Korea for its test of a powerful nuclear bomb, and South Korean announced today it would join a U.S.-led initiative to intercept ships suspected of spreading weapons of mass destruction.
The U.N. 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 immediately on a new resolution that could result in even stronger measures.
Russian officials said the nuclear bomb that the North detonated underground Monday was comparable to those that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, raising fears that the communist country could spread such technology abroad.
In a further sign of the mounting standoff, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that North Korea fired two short- range missiles off its east coast today.
Obama told South Korean President Lee Myung-bak that the United States will protect his country from any possible North Korean aggression and called for a “strong resolution” by the U.N., Lee’s spokesman Lee Dong-kwan said after the two leaders spoke by telephone today.
South Korea, which previously stayed out of the U.S.-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 program involves stopping and searching ships suspected of carrying nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, materials to make them, or missiles to deliver them.
North Korea previously has warned the South that its joining the program would be considered an act of war.
Earlier, Obama had criticized Pyongyang’s “blatant defiance” of U.N. resolutions. 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. Even traditional Pyongyang ally China said it was “resolutely opposed” to the test.
Today, North Korea accused the U.S. of hostility and said its army and people are ready to defeat an American invasion, accusing Obama of attempting to “militarily stifle” the communist country.
“The current U.S. administration is following in the footsteps of the previous Bush administration’s reckless policy of militarily stifling North Korea,” the North’s main Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary carried by the country’s official Korean Central News Agency.
Pyongyang’s unprecedented defiance has raised the stakes in the mounting standoff over its nuclear program.
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 the atomic and long-range missile tests.
“We’re heading for a full-blown crisis with the North,” said Peter Beck, a Korean affairs expert who teaches at American University in Washington, D.C.
The rise in tensions comes amid speculation about who will succeed North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il, 67, who is thought to have suffered a stroke in 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 increasingly has turned inward. With last month’s controversial rocket launch and Monday’s nuclear test, Kim clearly wants to show that the nation remains strong, analysts said.
“Kim Jong Il is trying to demonstrate his virility and that they are a power to be reckoned with,” Beck said.
North Korea boasted that its test was “on a new higher level in terms of its explosive power and technology of its control.”
