On October 3, North Korea's foreign ministry issued a statement announcing that US "threats of nuclear war, sanctions and pressure compel the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] to conduct a nuclear test, which is essential for bolstering its nuclear deterrent and as a corresponding measure for defence". Western spy agencies estimate North Korea has enough plutonium to make up to 10 nuclear bombs.
The US immediately began a push for a United Nations Security Council resolution imposing international sanctions on North Korea. However, both Beijing and Moscow rejected this, arguing for the resumption of the six-party talks involving the DPRK, China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US.
US United Nations ambassador John Bolton — who has also been unsuccessfully pushing for international sanctions against Iran — told journalists on October 4 that "North Korea's protectors" on the Security Council were delaying "action".
Wang Guangya, China's UN ambassador, told reporters: "If there could be some progress made between United States and North Korea, there could be less mistrust between the two, certainly it would lead to good results." Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov also called on the US to engage in one-on-one negotiations with North Korea before the six-party talks are resumed.
Since last November, North Korea has been calling for direct negotiations with the US, something Washington has refused.
North Korea walked out of the six-party talks 13 months ago, except for a brief meeting last November, because of the sanctions already being implemented against it by the US. Washington has forced US banks to end relations with a number of Asian and European banks that have DPRK accounts. Under the guise of opposing illicit activities, the sanctions are aimed at restricting North Korea's limited access to foreign exchange and economically strangling the DPRK.
North Korea withdrew from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 2003 after being threatened, along with Iraq and Iran, with "pre-emptive" attack by US President George Bush in his January 2002 State of the Union speech. All three governments were branded an "axis of evil" allegedly seeking to develop nuclear weapons in secret.
At the same time, the US — the only government to have ever used nuclear weapons, against the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — has pushed ahead, in violation of the NPT, with the "modernisation" of its arsenal of 10,000 nuclear weapons.
Washington also aided South Korea's effort to avoid any consequences for violating its nuclear safeguards agreement with the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency as recently as 2000 by secretly producing plutonium and weapons-grade uranium.
North Korea has offered to abandon its nuclear weapons program in exchange for a peace and non-aggression treaty with the US. The DPRK has been ringed by hostile US forces for more than half a century. It has tried many times to get Washington to negotiate a peace treaty that would formally end the 1950-53 war, when the US and its allies sent nearly 2 million troops in a failed attempt to crush North Korea's post-capitalist regime.
Washington needs to repeatedly stoke military tensions on the Korean Peninsula so as to justify keeping 30,000 US troops there (thus giving it leverage to keep South Korea under its political thumb) and to exert pressure on Japanese public opinion to accept greater Japanese participation in US-led imperialist militarism.