CBS:
The United Nations Security Council has announced an emergency meeting after North Korea carried out its fifth nuclear test over night. The country claims it’s now able to arm its ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, and while that’s likely still an ambition, the test is raising serious concerns.
A 5.3-magnitude tremor, detected in a remote area of North Korea, was the first sign of the test, and it triggered rapid international condemnation.
President Obama — returning from a trip to Asia — said there would be “serious consequences.”
As CBS News correspondent Adriana Diaz reports, it is North Korea’s second nuclear test this year, and it comes just after the U.S. and South Korea held joint military exercises last month — and amid planning for a missile defense shield on the Korean Peninsula.
All of those factors have angered the North and its increasingly-isolated leader Kim Jong Un, and the test will only further complicate an already-tense situation.
North Korea said overnight the test was performed on a “newly-developed nuclear warhead” at a remote site used for previous nuclear tests.
“The standardization of the nuclear warhead will enable (North Korea) to produce at will and as many as it wants a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power with a firm hold on the production of various fissile materials and technology for their use. This has definitely put on a higher level (the North’s) technology of mounting nuclear warheads on ballistic rockets,” the North’s state-run media announced.
Hours after the test, South Korean officials scrambled together an emergency meeting. On his way back from Asia, President Obama consulted with the South’s President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in separate phone calls.
According to White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, Mr. Obama would continue close consultations with allies in the region “to ensure provocative actions from North Korea are met with serious consequences.”
