Trump Meets Security Advisers over «Hostile» N Korea Test

Local Editor

US President Donald Trump was convening his security team Sunday to weigh options including drastic economic sanctions against North Korea after Pyongyang detonated what it claimed was a hydrogen bomb able to fit atop a missile.

The US president said in a tweet that the time for "appeasement" was over, and a top adviser said Trump was weighing "all our options."

"The national security team is monitoring this closely," said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in announcing the urgent meeting on a US holiday weekend.

In a Twitter message, Trump denounced the unexpectedly powerful test - said to be the North's first blast to exceed in magnitude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan - as "very hostile and dangerous to the United States."

North Korea said its test of what it described as a hydrogen bomb designed for a long-range missile was "a perfect success."

The Sunday blast was so powerful that US monitors measured a 6.3-magnitude earthquake near the North's main testing site, and it was felt in China and Russia.

Pyongyang residents threw their arms aloft in triumph as a jubilant television newsreader hailed the "unprecedentedly large" blast; she said it had moved the country closer to "the final goal of completing the state nuclear force."

Condemnation from world capitals was swift, including from China and Russia while South Korean President Moon Jae-In called for the "strongest punishment."

Trump, who has waged an on-again-off-again war of words with the North's leader Kim Jong-Un, refrained from direct threats Sunday.

But in a Twitter message he branded the North "a rogue nation which has become a great threat and embarrassment to China, which is trying to help but with little success."

Trump has repeatedly insisted that Beijing lean heavily on its isolated neighbor to halt its nuclear and missile development.

On Sunday, however, the US president also aimed criticism at the government in Seoul.

South Korea, Trump said, "is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!"

A series of US and United Nations-backed sanctions against the North have had little apparent effect on Pyongyang, as Kim has repeatedly seemed to brush off Trump's strongest warnings.

But US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Sunday that his department was preparing potent new measures that would completely "cut off North Korea economically."

"I'm going to draft a sanctions package and send it to the president for his strong consideration that anybody that wants to do trade or business with them will be prevented from doing trade or business with us," Mnuchin said on "Fox News Sunday."

But he also said Trump had made it clear that he will "look at all our options."

While the United States has virtually no trade with the North, the burden of sanctions such as Mnuchin described would fall heavily on China, which buys about 90 percent of North Korean exports.

Hours before the test, the North released images of Kim at his country's Nuclear Weapons Institute, inspecting what it said was a miniaturized H-bomb that could be fitted onto an intercontinental ballistic missile [ICBM].

China, the North's sole major ally, issued a "strong condemnation" of the test.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe described the test 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." He said the South would discuss deploying "the strongest strategic assets of the US military" - a possible reference to tactical nuclear weapons, which the US withdrew from South Korea in 1991.

While US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spoke by phone with his Asian counterparts, US and South Korean military chiefs also conferred.

Seoul's defense ministry said the respective chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - General Jeong Kyeong-Doo and General Joseph Dunford - had "agreed to prepare a South Korea-US military counteraction and to put it into action at the earliest date."

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team