There has so far been one known nuclear test to have taken place, which was underground at Gilju.
North Korea Wednesday warned that it would conduct another nuclear test if the UN Security Council refused to apologise for criticising the Stalinist state’s April 5 rocket launch.
‘Unless the UN Security Council offers an apology immediately, we will be forced to take additional self-defence measures to protect the highest interests of our republic,’ a foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement cited by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
Those measures would include nuclear and ballistic missile tests, it said.
After the Security Council condemned North Korea’s rocket launch, which Western powers said was a cover-up for testing a long-range ballistic missile, Pyongyang quit international talks to end its nuclear weapons programme and announced it had restarted re-processing nuclear fuel to obtain plutonium for nuclear arms.
North Korea sees nuclear weapons as a neccessary deterrence in its ideological struggle for survival in the modern world.
The last and only nuclear test North Korea attempted was widely said to have ‘failed’ because such a weak seismic reading was detected.
