OSLO, Norway — Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Friday that China shares responsibility for the latest North Korean nuclear test and urged the country to use its influence to stop future tests.
“It’s China’s responsibility. It shares important responsibility for this development and has an important responsibility to reverse it. It’s important that it use its location, its history and its influence to further the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and not the direction things have been going,” Carter said at a joint press conference in an aircraft hangar in Oslo.
North Korea tested its fifth nuclear weapon Friday, and its second this year, drawing sharp condemnation from the White House.
“To be clear, the United States does not, and never will, accept North Korea as a nuclear state,” Obama said. “Far from achieving its stated national security and economic development goals, North Korea’s provocative and destabilizing actions have instead served to isolate and impoverish its people through its relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capabilities,” President Obama said in a statement.
The nuclear weapon test follows a string of ballistic missile launches, which also violate United Nations Security Council resolutions.
Carter spoke with South Korean Defense Minister Han Min-goo by phone on Friday from Norway and said he reemphasized the U.S. commitment to defend South Korea, as well as other allies.
The secretary also called for more sanctions on North Korea in response to the test, as well as speeding up the process of improving deterrent capabilities on the Korean peninsula, like missile defense capabilities and adding more terminal high-altitude area defense units to the region.
“This test and other North Korean provocations confirm and strengthen our resolve to get on with all the things that we’re doing to try to defend ourselves from and deter North Korean aggression against both ourselves, South Korea, Japan and elsewhere,” Carter said.
