N. Korea preparing for fourth nuclear test – South

Ban urges N.Korea to refrain from ‘further provocation’

NETHERLANDS: UN chief Ban Ki-moon made an urgent appeal to North Korea on Monday to refrain from “any further provocation”, following reports that the increasingly isolated state is preparing a fresh missile test launch.

“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea cannot go on like this, confronting and challenging the authority of the (UN) Security Council and the international community,” Ban said in The Hague.

“I am urging them to refrain from taking any further provocative measures.” “This is an urgent and honest appeal from the international community including myself,” Ban told a press conference alongside Netherlands Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans in The Hague, where the UN chief is to attend the third review of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

“I have repeatedly expressed my great concern around the continued inflammatory rhetoric coming from Pyongyang, which has gone too far already,” Ban said.

“I have warned the DPRK authorities that making any threat to nuclear weapons is not a game. The Security Council... sent an unequivocal message that the international community will not tolerate its pursuit of nuclear weapons.” “It is time for all the parties concerned to help reduce the tension,” Ban said.

AFP

SOUTH KOREA: North Korea appears to be preparing a fourth nuclear test as well as a provocative missile launch, South Korea said Monday, despite an unusually blunt call from China for restraint.

Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-Jae told lawmakers there were “signs” that another test was in the pipeline, with intelligence reports showing heightened activity at the North’s Punggye-ri atomic test site.

“We are trying to figure out whether it is a genuine preparation for a nuclear test or just a ploy to heap more pressure on us and the US,” the JoongAng Ilbo daily cited a senior South Korean government official as saying.

It was the North’s third nuclear test in February and subsequent UN sanctions that kickstarted the cycle of ongoing escalating military tensions on the Korean peninsula. Intelligence reports also suggest Pyongyang has readied two mid-range missiles on mobile launchers on its east coast, and is aiming at a test firing before the April 15 birthday of late founding leader Kim Il-Sung.

Kim Jang-Soo, chief national security adviser to President Park Geun-Hye, said a test-launch could come before or after Wednesday, the date by which the North has suggested foreign diplomats consider leaving Pyongyang.

Japan has ordered its armed forces to shoot down any North Korean missile headed towards its territory, a defence ministry spokesman in Tokyo said Monday. A missile launch would be highly provocative, especially given the strong rebuke the North’s sole ally China handed it on the weekend and a US concession to delay its own planned missile test. “No one should be allowed to throw a region, even the whole world, into chaos for selfish gains,” Chinese President Xi Jinping told an international forum in southern China on Sunday. Although he did not mention North Korea by name, Xi’s remarks were taken as a clear warning to the regime in Pyongyang which is hugely dependent on China’s economic and diplomatic support. The United States, which has met the North’s threats with some military muscle-flexing of its own, offered a calibrated concession Saturday by delaying a planned inter-continental ballistic missile test.

AFP