(Reuters) – A bristling North Korea said on Wednesday it was ready to retaliate in the face of international condemnation over its failed rocket launch, increasing the likelihood the hermit state will push ahead with a third nuclear test.
The North also ditched an agreement to allow back inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. That followed a U.S. decision, in response to a rocket launch the United States says was a disguised long-range missile test, to break off a deal earlier this year to provide the impoverished state with food aid.
Pyongyang called the U.S. move a hostile act and said it was no longer bound to stick to its side of the February 29 agreement, dashing any hopes that new leader Kim Jong-un would soften a foreign policy that has for years been based on the threat of an atomic arsenal to leverage concessions out of regional powers.
“We have thus become able to take necessary retaliatory measures, free from the agreement,” the official KCNA news agency said, without specifying what actions it might take.
Many analysts expect that with its third test, North Korea will for the first time try a nuclear device using highly enriched uranium, something it was long suspected of developing but which it only publicly admitted to about two years ago.
“If it conducts a nuclear test, it will be uranium rather than plutonium because North Korea would want to use the test as a big global advertisement for its newer, bigger nuclear capabilities,” said Baek Seung-joo of the Seoul-based Korea Institute for Defence Analysis.
Defence experts say that by successfully enriching uranium, to make bombs of the type dropped on Hiroshima nearly 70 years ago, the North would be able to significantly build it up stocks of weapons-grade nuclear material.
It would also allow it more easily to manufacture a nuclear warhead to mount on a long-range missile.
The latest international outcry against Pyongyang followed last week’s rocket launch, which the United States and others said was in reality the test of a long range missile with the potential to reach the U.S. mainland.
China, the North’s main economic and diplomatic backer, called for “dialogue and communication” and continued engagement with the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors.
North Korea has insisted that the rocket launch, which in a rare public admission it said failed, was meant to put a satellite into orbit as part of celebrations to mark the 100th birthday of former president Kim Il-sung, whose family has ruled the autocratic state since it was founded after World War Two. Kim died in 1994.
The peninsula has been divided ever since with the two Koreas yet to sign a formal peace treaty to end the 1950-53 Korean War.
Recent satellite images have showed that the North has pushed ahead with work at a facility where it conducted previous nuclear tests.
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