U.S. Envoy Sees U.N. Unity on N. Korea
By JOHN O’NEIL and DAVID E. SANGER
The United Nations Security Council agreed this morning to condemn North Korea for the nuclear test it announced and will begin considering a resolution calling for sanctions this afternoon, said John R. Bolton, the American ambassador.
Mr. Bolton said the expression of disapproval did not come in a formal resolution, but that the preliminary response of the council was unanimous in condemning the claim Sunday night of a successful test, which would represent North Korea’s first nuclear explosion.
“No one’s defending it,” Mr. Bolton said of North Korea’s announcement. “No one came even close to defending it.”
In the past, China and Russia have resisted American calls for tough sanctions against North Korea, as they have in a parallel dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. Today, they both issued unusually blunt statements denouncing Pyongyang’s action.
China, the closest supporter of the regime, called it a “flagrant and brazen” violation of international opinion and said it “firmly opposes” North Korea’s conduct.
Russian President Vladimir V. Putin said “Russia absolutely condemns North Korea’s nuclear test.”
At the White House this morning, President Bush denounced North Korea’s announcement as a “provocative act.”
Mr. Bush said he had spoken this morning to the leaders of China, South Korea, Russia and Japan, and that they were all agreed that North Korea’s actions “are unacceptable and deserve an immediate response.”
Mr. Bush was careful to say that intelligence officials were still working to confirm North Korea’s statement. But he said that “such a claim itself constitutes a threat to international peace and security.”
The test was announced by the official Korean Central News Agency, which declared it a “historic event” and said there was no leak of radiation or other danger.
There was widespread agreement that there had been some sort of seismic event in North Korea — The United States Geological Survey said it had detected a tremor of 4.2 magnitude. But monitoring agencies disagreed in their estimates of the force of the blast, raising some question about exactly what the North Koreans had done.
Russia’s defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, said that the Russian military had confirmed the test and estimated its force at somewhere between 5 and 15 kilotons — much larger than estimates from South Korea. France estimated it as merely the equivalent of about 500 tons of TNT, and did not confirm that it was the result of a nuclear device, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Bush said he “remains committed to diplomacy,” but that any transfer by North Korea of nuclear or nuclear-related missile technology to “any state or non-state actor” would “be considered a grave threat to the United States.”
North Korea’s announcement comes two days after the country was warned by the United Nations Security Council of severe consequences if it followed through on its plan for a test.
The step makes North Korea the eighth nation in history, and arguably the most unstable and most dangerous, to openly test a nuclear weapon. A ninth, Israel, is believed to have nuclear arms but has never said so or announced a test.
The European Union, the International Atomic Agency, and nations across the world, including Pakistan, India and Indonesia, denounced the North Korean test today.
Iran, which is already at odds with the United Nations Security Council over its own nuclear program, stood out from the general mood of condemnation. Its state-run radio today blamed pressure from the United States for North Korea’s decision to test, A.P. reported, calling it “a reaction to America’s threats and humiliations
Senior Bush administration officials said that while they had not yet confirmed that the test had taken place, they had little reason to doubt the North Korean announcement. They warned that a test would usher in a new era of confrontation with the isolated and unpredictable country run by President Kim Jong-il.
What form that confrontation would take was not yet clear. Last week, the administration’s special envoy for North Korea issued a stern warning to Pyongyang not to go ahead with its threatened test, saying “‘We are not going to live with a nuclear North Korea.”
Early this morning, Bush administration officials were holding conference calls to discuss ways to further cut off a country that is already subject to sanctions, and hard-liners said the moment had arrived for neighboring countries, especially China and Russia, to cut off the trade and oil supplies that have been Mr. Kim’s lifeline.
Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican who is the vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said today that while he supported Mr. Bush’s push for sanctions, he thought that new attempts at reaching out to Pyongyang were needed as well.
“While we’re tough with the North Koreans, you have to have dialogue and discussions as well,” Mr. Weldon, who has made several trips to Pyongyang, said in a televised interview on CNN.
In South Korea, the country that fought a bloody war with the North for three years and has lived with an uneasy truce and failed efforts at reconciliation for more than half a century, officials said they believed that an explosion occurred Sunday around 10:36 p.m. New York time — 11:36 a.m. Monday in Korea.
They identified the source of the explosion as North Hamgyong Province, roughly the area where American spy satellites have been focused for several years on a variety of suspected underground test sites.
That was less than an hour after North Korean officials had called their counterparts in China and warned them that a test was just minutes away. The Chinese, who have been North Korea’s main ally for 60 years but have grown increasingly frustrated by the its defiance of Beijing, sent an emergency alert to Washington through the United States Embassy in Beijing. Within minutes, President Bush was notified, shortly after 10 p.m., by his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, that a test was imminent.
Investors in South Korea reacted with dismay to the news today, driving the main Korean stock index down more than 2.4 percent. Stocks also fell more than 1 percent in Hong Kong and Singapore, but markets elsewhere showed little reaction to the news.
North Korea’s decision to conduct the test demonstrated what the world has suspected for years: the country has joined India, Pakistan and Israel in the club of nations that have developed nuclear weapons despite efforts to limit proliferation beyond the five Security Council powers — Britain, France, Russia, China and the United States — which acquired them in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
India and Pakistan each conducted tests in 1998; Israel has never acknowledged conducting a test or possessing a weapon. But by actually setting off a weapon, if that is proven, the North has chosen to end years of carefully crafted and diplomatically useful ambiguity about its abilities.
The North’s decision to set off a nuclear device could profoundly change the politics of Asia.
The test occurred only a week after Japan installed a new, more nationalistic prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and just as the country was renewing a debate about whether its ban on possessing nuclear weapons — deeply felt in a country that saw two of its cities incinerated in 1945 — still makes strategic sense.
And it shook the peninsula just as Mr. Abe was arriving in South Korea for the first time as prime minister, in an effort to repair a badly strained relationship, having just visited with Chinese leaders in Beijing. It places his untested administration in the midst of one of the region’s biggest security crises in years, and one whose outcome will be watched closely in Iran and other states suspected of attempting to follow the path that North Korea has taken.
Now, Tokyo and Washington are expected to put even more pressure on the South Korean government to terminate its “sunshine policy” of trade, tourism and openings to the North — a policy that has been the source of enormous tension between Seoul and Washington since Mr. Bush took office.
John O’Neil reported from New York and David E. Sanger from Washington. William J. Broad contributed reporting from New York, Thom Shanker from Washington and Steven Lee Myers from Moscow. |
