Image: People walk past a street monitor showing a news report about North Korea’s nuclear test, in Tokyo, Japan, September 3, 2017. REUTERS/Toru Hanai
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – North Korea’s “words and actions continue to be very hostile and dangerous to the United States,” U.S. President Donald Trump said on Twitter, in his first reaction after Pyongyang conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test on Sunday.
“North Korea is a rogue nation which has become a great threat and embarrassment to China, which is trying to help but with little success,” Trump said in a second tweet.
The White House said Trump’s national-security team was “monitoring this closely” and that Trump will convene a meeting of his advisers later on Sunday.
North Korea said it had tested an advanced hydrogen bomb for a long-rang missile Sunday, setting off a manmade earthquake near the North’s test, which Japanese and South Korean officials said was around 10 times more powerful than the tremor picked up after its last nuclear test a year ago.
There was no independent confirmation that the detonation was a hydrogen bomb rather than a less powerful atomic weapon of the kind Pyongyang has tested in the past.
Trump also rebuked South Korea on Twitter, saying “their talk of appeasement with North Korea won’t work, they (North Korea) only understand one thing.”
(Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by Joel Schectman and James Oliphant; Editing by Susan Fenton and Mary Milliken)
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