North Korea threatens to hold fourth nuclear test after UN human rights ruling
Nation's move comes as it claims United States hostility led to approval of landmark UN resolution on human rights violations, which includes idea leader Kim Jong-un could be targeted by prosecutors
North Korea threatened today to bolster its war capability and conduct a fourth nuclear test to cope with what it calls United States hostility that led to the approval of a landmark UN resolution on its human rights violations.
On Tuesday a UN committee adopted the resolution urging the Security Council to refer the North’s rights situation to the International Criminal Court.
It is the first time a UN resolution included the idea that the North’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, could be targeted by prosecutors. Before the UN vote, a North Korean envoy threatened a nuclear test.
On Thursday, Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry called the resolution’s approval a “grave political provocation”, and said it was orchestrated by the US, although it had been drafted by the European Union and Japan.
An unidentified ministry spokesman told state media that the North’s war deterrence would be strengthened in an “unlimited manner” to cope with US hostility, which was “compelling us not to refrain from conducting a new nuclear test any longer”.
His comments on the nuclear test were nearly identical to what Choe Myong Nam, a foreign ministry adviser for UN and human rights issues, said at the UN.
The North has used similar rhetoric before when there has been increased tension with other countries.
Analysts said it was unlikely the North would follow through on its threats to conduct a nuclear test because that would invite further international condemnation and derail efforts to attract foreign investment and aid to revive its moribund economy.
China and Russia, which hold veto power on the Security Council, would not let the council refer the North’s rights situation to the criminal court, but North Korea also knew the two countries did not want another nuclear test by Pyongyang, said Lim Eul Chul, a North Korea expert at South Korea’s Kyungnam University.
Both China and Russia voted against the non-binding resolution, which goes to the General Assembly for a vote in the coming weeks.
However, North Korea often confounds outside analysts’ predictions and does not always act according to a set pattern.
Two deadly attacks blamed on Pyongyang, which killed 50 South Koreans in 2010, were a surprise because they came amid relatively easing tensions with the US and South Korea.
The US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington, said the North might be restarting a plant that could reprocess nuclear fuel into weapons-grade plutonium for the first time in six years. The finding is based on analysis of recent commercial satellite imagery at the North’s main nuclear facility.
North Korea conducted an atomic bomb test in 2006, 2009 and last year – each time inviting international sanctions. A fourth test would mark another defiant response to US-led international pressure on North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programme, because that could put the country a step closer to the goal of producing warheads small enough to mount on a missile capable of reaching the US.
