this is all we need right now

Defying world powers, N. Korea conducts nuke test

SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea defied world powers and carried out an underground test Monday of a nuclear bomb Russian officials said was comparable to those that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The incident drew condemnation from Washington to Beijing and set the communist regime up for a showdown with the United Nations.

The U.N. Security Council was meeting later Monday in New York to discuss what President Barack Obama called Pyongyang's "blatant defiance" of resolutions banning the regime from developing weapons of mass destruction. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned the test as a "danger to the world." Russia's Foreign Ministry called it "a serious blow to international efforts" to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

French officials said they would push for new sanctions, and even traditional Pyongyang ally China said it was "resolutely opposed" to the test, which Russian officials estimated yielded a powerful 10- to 20-kiloton blast — enough to flatten a city and far more than North Korea managed in a 2006 atomic test.

Pyongyang's unprecedented defiance raises the stakes in the mounting standoff over its nuclear program.

Last month, Pyongyang launched a rocket despite international calls for restraint, abandoned international nuclear negotiations, restarted its nuclear plants and warned it would carry out the atomic and long-range missile tests.

"We're heading for a full-blown crisis with the North," said Peter Beck, a Korean affairs expert who teaches at American University in Washington.

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Along with all of the other disasters bush left us, the way he ignored N. Korea's nuclear proliferation is now coming back at us, as well.

Thanks a lot, bushie!