UN tries again to get NKorea to end threats
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ‘‘is begging for war,’’ Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told the Security Council on Monday.
Her remark came a day after the North’s most powerful nuclear test to date
and hours after South Korean officials told lawmakers that North Korea might be preparing to launch another ballistic missile to mark the coming anniversary of the founding of the North’s government.
“We have kicked the can down the road long enough,” Haley told the council in an emergency meeting. “There is no more road left.”
Haley did not threaten unilateral military action by Washington or repeat President Donald Trump’s statement on Twitter that South Korea’s call for more diplomacy was a form of “appeasement.” She said instead that “the time has come for us to exhaust all of our diplomatic means before it’s too late.”
In a series of tweets over the holiday weekend, Trump threatened to halt all trade with countries doing business with North Korea, a warning to China, and faulted South Korea for what he called “talk of appeasement.”
In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang, told reporters in Beijing on Monday that China regarded as “unacceptable a situation in which on the one hand we work to resolve this issue peacefully but on the other hand our own interests are subject to sanctions and jeopardized. This is neither
objective nor fair.”
It was the second time in less than a week that the Security Council had met to discuss North Korea, and the 10th time it has done so this year.
Last month, the council tightened sanctions against North Korea, unanimously adopting a resolution that Haley called “the most stringent set of sanctions on any country in a generation.”
But since then, North Korea carried out one of its most provocative missile tests in recent years, hurling a ballistic missile directly over Japan that prompted the government in Tokyo to warn residents in its path to take cover.
And on Sunday, the North conducted its most powerful nuclear test ever, with a blast that experts said was far more destructive than the bombs the United States dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
In her remarks, Haley gave a lengthy summary of the North’s flouting of international law since 1993, when the United Nations urged the country to reconsider its decision to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
“Despite our efforts over the past 24 years, the North Korean nuclear program is more advanced and more dangerous than ever,” she said. “They now fire missiles over Japanese airspace.”
“Enough is enough. War is never something the United States wants. We don’t want it now. But our country’s patience is not unlimited,” Haley said.
Koro Bessho, the Japanese ambassador to the United Nations, also stopped short of threatening military action but said the danger from North Korea had been “raised to an unprecedented level” and was “a grave threat to the peace and the security of the world.”
François Delattre, the French ambassador, also called for new sanctions. “It is no longer a regional threat, it is a global threat,” he said. “It is no longer a virtual threat, it is an imminent threat. It is no longer a serious threat, it is an existential threat.”
China’s Liu Jieyi vowed that Beijing would “never allow chaos and war” on the Korean Peninsula, where the United States and China were both combatants in a conflict that lasted from 1950 to 1953. He called for all sides to return to the negotiating table, aposition echoed by Vasily Nebenzya, the Russian ambassador.
The nuclear test that the North carried out on Sunday set off a magnitude 6.3 tremor centered at the testing site in the country’s northeast, the U.S. Geological Survey said. It was followed by a weaker tremor believed to have resulted from a collapse in the testing site.
The South Korean military
carried out drills on Sunday, with F-15K fighter jets and ground forces firing missiles in a simulated attack on the North’s nuclear site. The South’s president, Moon Jae-in, talked with Trump by telephone on Monday evening, the South Korean leader’s office said.
“President Trump reaffirmed the United States’ ironclad commitment to defend South Korea,” said Park Soo-hyun, a spokesman for Moon. “The two leaders also agreed to push for maximum pressure and sanctions against North Korea and a stronger sanctions resolution” in the Security Council.
During the call, the spokesman said, Trump resolved a major South Korean grievance by agreeing to let it build more powerful non-nuclear ballistic missiles.
Testifying before the South Korean National Assembly on Monday, Defense Minister Song Young-moo said he had told U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in a meeting last week that the United States needed to send long-range bombers, aircraft carriers and other strategic assets to the Korean Peninsula more often or regularly to reassure the South Koreans.
He said he had told Mattis that many in his country were calling for the reintroduction of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea. He did not disclose how Mattis responded.