The Start of An Asian Nuclear Arms Race?

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The apparent test was conducted at 10:36 a.m on Monday morning. A senior U.S. official said China was given a 20-minute warning ahead of the test and in turn told the United States, Japan and South Korea about getting the advance notice. The US Geological Survey said it detected a tremor of 4.2 magnitude on the Korean Peninsula.

Minutes later, North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency declared the underground test a triumph and had not resulted in any leak of radiation. The agency called it "a historical event that has brought our military and our people huge joy."

The move drew strong international condemnation. The U.S. said the reported test was a "provocative act." China expressed its "resolute opposition" to the test and said it "defied the universal opposition of international society." Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called the claimed test "unpardonable" and said the region was "entering a new, dangerous nuclear age". South Korea’s military ordered the army to step up a state of alert.

The U.N. Security Council urged North Korea last week not to carry out a test, warning of unspecified consequences if it did. Pyongyang pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 and has refused for a year to attend talks aimed at ending its nuclear ambitions.

Today’s test appeared linked to the ninth anniversary of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s appointment as head of the Korean Workers" Party. And it came just one day before South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon will face a vote on his bid to become the next secretary general of the United Nations.

• Tim Shorrock, independent journalist who has covered U.S.-Korean relations for over 20 years. His reports have appeared in The Nation, Mother Jones and Harpers.

AMY GOODMAN: Tim Shorrock is an independent journalist who has covered U.S.-Korean relations for decades. He joins me on the phone from his home in Tennessee. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Tim.

TIM SHORROCK: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of this reported test?

TIM SHORROCK: Well, this is a monumental event for Korea, for the United States, for all the countries in that region of the world, but it's something that I don't think anyone is surprised at really. This has been -- North Korea has been saying for years it's on the road to developing nuclear weapons, and it's tried desperately to use this, its possession of plutonium and then weapons, as a way to get bilateral talks with the United States to create a new relationship, they say, with the United States. Two years ago, they brought in a set of, a group of U.S. scientists, and they actually showed them, you know, that they had made plutonium. So, we know they've been on the road toward weaponry, and they have finally done it. This makes North Korea the eighth nuclear power in the world, which is a major development, particularly in a part of the world, the only place where nuclear weapons have ever been dropped in a war.

AMY GOODMAN: Is there any reason to believe that this actually might not have happened?

TIM SHORROCK: Well, yes, I think that for -- like I said, the North Koreans have been demanding, jumping up and down, screaming they want bilateral talks with the United States. The Bush administration, from the get-go of this -- of Bush's term has refused to talk with North Korea. At the beginning of the Bush administration, I think the idea was, North Korea would kind of go away, would collapse of its own weight. People might remember that when the former president of South Korea, Kim Dae-Jung, longtime dissident who became the South Korean president in the late ’90s and opened up really the first economic and political relationship between South and North Korea that had ever existed since the Korean War, when Kim Dae-Jung came to the White House soon after Bush was sworn in, Bush publicly repudiated his policies, the so-called Sunshine Policies, said North Korea is not to be trusted. And from that moment on, relations have deteriorated.

Shortly after 9/11, the North Koreans decided to scrap their earlier agreement with the United States and started proceeding on this road, always saying they want to have discussions with the United States, bilateral talks. But this has been something that Bush has just simply refused to do.

AMY GOODMAN: The essential difference between how President Clinton has dealt with North Korea and President Bush has?

TIM SHORROCK: Well, the Clinton administration agreed to negotiate directly with the government. In 2000, the end of 2000, shortly before the change in the administrations, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright was in Pyongyang, North Korea. She actually met with the president of North Korea. At that time, the North Koreans and the United States had an agreement under which North Korea would suspend its nuclear program in return for economic assistance and a better relationship with the United States. And when Albright was in Pyongyang on that visit, there was discussions toward an agreement that would stop North Korea's testing and manufacturing of missiles. And those negotiations were stopped cold when Bush came in, and he has consistently -- his administration has refused to have any direct negotiations with the North Koreans.

And all the countries that are part of these six-party talks -- Russia, China, Japan, particularly Russia and China and South Korea, of course -- have been all the time saying, “There must be direct talks. Please have direct talks.” This is the only way to resolve this, because the North sees the conflict, not with other countries, but directly with the United States. And they see their survival at stake, and they see nuclear weapons as the only way to guarantee their survival.