Pakistan condemns North Korea’s hydrogen bomb test

Foreign Office calls for collective efforts to end global nuclear arms race

Pakistan's Foreign Office has condemned North Korea's move to conduct its latest hydrogen bomb test.

"North Korea should abide by the UN resolutions on nuclear weapons," the Foreign Office spokesperson said.

The Foreign Office called for collective efforts to end the global nuclear arms race saying that it brought only destruction.

North Korea said on Sunday that it had tested a hydrogen bomb which it could mount on a missile.

The government of Japan confirmed that North Korea has conducted its sixth nuclear test, citing seismic monitors measuring an “explosion” of 6.3 magnitude near its main test site.

Hours before the test the North released images of leader Kim Jong-Un at the Nuclear Weapons Institute, inspecting what it said was a miniaturised H-bomb that could be fitted onto an intercontinental ballistic missile.

China lost no time in issuing “strong condemnation” of the test, which overshadowed the opening of the BRICS summit in Xiamen by leader Xi Jinping.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe described it as “absolutely unacceptable” while Russia’s foreign ministry expressed “strongest condemnation” but urged calm.

In Seoul, President Moon Jae-In called for new United Nations sanctions to “completely isolate North Korea” and said the South would discuss deploying “the strongest strategic assets of the US military”. That could be taken as a reference to tactical nuclear weapons, which were withdrawn from South Korea by Washington in 1991.

The US and South Korean military chiefs spoke by telephone and agreed the test was “a provocation that cannot be overlooked”, Seoul’s defence ministry said in a statement. The chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff, General Jeong Kyeong-Doo and General Joseph Dunford, “agreed to prepare a South Korea-US military counteraction and to put it into action at the earliest date.”

US monitors measured a 6.3-magnitude tremor near the North’s main testing site, which South Korean experts said was five to six times stronger than that from the 10-kiloton test carried out a year ago.
The tremor was felt in northeastern China, with people in the border city of Yanji saying they fled their homes in their underwear, and in the Russian Pacific city of Vladivostok.