(From Reuters| RT)
The United Nations Security Council on Sunday condemned North Korea’s latest rocket launch and vowed to take “significant measures” in response to Pyongyang’s violations of U.N. resolutions, Venezuela’s U.N. ambassador said.
“The members of the Security Council strongly condemned this launch,” Venezuelan Ambassador Rafael Dario Ramirez Carreno, president of the council this month, told reporters. He said the launch was “a serious violation of Security Council resolutions.”
U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power told reporters: “We will ensure that the Security Council imposes serious consequences. DPRK’s (North Korea) latest transgressions require our response to be even firmer.”
The UN move comes amid reports that North Korea is preparing for its fifth nuclear test.
Yonhap cited a Seoul lawmaker as saying that North Korea has the technology for making an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Russia’s Interfax agency too cited the North Korean embassy in Moscow as saying that Pyongyang is planning to continue to launching rockets carrying satellites into space.
Early Sunday, the North Korean satellite was launched on a “carrier rocket” that blasted off from the Sohae Space Center in Cholsan County.
North Korea said the launch of its satellite Kwangmyongsong-4, named after late leader Kim Jong Il, was a “complete success” and that it was making a polar orbit of the earth every 94 minutes. The launch order was given by his son, leader Kim Jong Un.
North Korea’s last long-range rocket launch, in 2012, put what it called a communications satellite into orbit, but no signal has ever been detected from it.
“Everything we have seen is consistent with a successful repeat of the 2012 (launch),” said U.S. missile technology expert John Schilling.
“But it’s still too early to tell for sure,” said Schilling, who is involved in the “38 North” North Korean monitoring project at Johns Hopkins University.
The rocket was launched around 9:30 a.m. Seoul time (7.30 p.m. ET/0030 GMT) in a southward trajectory, as planned. Japan’s Fuji Television Network showed a streak of light heading into the sky, taken from a camera at China’s border with North Korea.
North Korea had notified U.N. agencies that it planned to launch a rocket carrying an Earth observation satellite, triggering opposition from governments that see it as a long-range missile test.
The U.N. Security Council was likely to hold an emergency meeting on Sunday to discuss the launch, at the request of the United States, Japan and South Korea, diplomats said.
The United States was tracking the rocket launch and said it did not believe that it posed a threat to the United States or its allies, defense officials said.