North Korea plans new nuclear test and rocket launches

North Korea defied international condemnation today by vowing to carry out a third nuclear test.

The pariah regime also said its long-range rockets were designed to carry not only satellites but warheads that could target America.

The National Defence Commission, headed by the country’s leader Kim Jong Un, rejected a United Nations Security Council resolution that a long-range rocket launch last month was a banned missile activity. Sanctions will now be tightened on Pyongyang.

The commission insisted the launch was a peaceful bid to put a satellite in space. But it added that the rocket tests have a military purpose of preparing for a possible attack on the US. North Korea’s leaders vowed to keep launching satellites and rockets — and to conduct a nuclear test as part of a “new phase” of combat with the US, which it blames for leading the UN sanctions.

The commission said: “We do not hide that a variety of satellites and long-range rockets launched one after another and a nuclear test of higher level to be carried out in the upcoming all-out action — a new phase of the anti-US struggle that has lasted century after century — will target the US, the sworn enemy of the Korean people.

“Settling accounts with the US needs to be done with force, not with words, as it regards jungle law as the rule of its survival.” It was a rare declaration by the powerful military commission, once led by late leader Kim Jong Il and now commanded by his son.

Experts believe the reference to a “higher level” nuclear test most likely means a device made from highly enriched uranium, which is easier to miniaturise than the plutonium bombs it tested in 2006 and 2009. North Korea, where millions suffer starvation, malnutrition and poverty, is not yet believed to have mastered the technique for making its atomic devices smaller and capable of being loaded as warheads onto long-range missiles.

A visiting scientific observer estimated it has stored enough weaponised plutonium for four to eight bombs.