MOSCOW, January 12. /TASS/. Russia and China should jointly consider the situation in the Far East region where North Korea tested a nuclear device, the former secretary of the Russian Security Council, Academician Andrey Kokoshin, told TASS on Tuesday.
"It seems that the North Korean nuclear issue, first of all, should be the subject of serious consideration by Russia and China in the context of our current high level of strategic partnership, which is special in many ways," he said, analysing the international situation after Pyongyang's first test of a hydrogen bomb carried out on January 6.
Kokoshin said that "this explosion and subsequent events cause serious concern in China." "No wonder Beijing calls on both sides [North and South Korea] to exercise restraint," he said. "Of course, contacts of Russia and China with DPRK on security issues in the region are needed."
Kokoshin, who is academician-secretary of the Social Science Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said such consultations are necessary because "North Korea’s nuclear test is clearly not an event stabilizing the international political and military situation." He said that "this test, as we can see, is used by the United States and its allies as a pretext for additional military actions in the region, including in the nuclear sphere."
"And all this takes place in close proximity to Russia's borders, which cannot but arouse our most serious concern," the scientist said. "This North Korean explosion has once again shown the acuteness of the problem of nuclear weapons’ spread for the international community, which, obviously, has not yet been adequately addressed. In the not so distant past, there was a six-party format of the consideration of this very important (North Korean nuclear) problem, which for various reasons has ceased to function."
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"This is also a question of our diplomatic interaction with such countries as Japan, South Korea and, of course, the United States," the academician said.
North Korea announced last Wednesday that it had successfully conducted a hydrogen bomb test. The country’s government said in a statement circulated by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) the test had had "no adverse impacts on the environmental situation." Now, according to the statement, North Korea "possesses the strongest deterrent forces."
North Korea previously conducted three nuclear tests: in 2006, in 2009 and in 2013. Following these tests, the United Nations Security Council imposed various sanctions on Pyongyang. In the past two years, North Korea refrained from nuclear tests limiting itself to ballistic missile launches as a response to the US-South Korea large-scale military drills.