Security Council OKs Korea sanctions

The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved more sanctions Thursday against North Korea, imposing penalties on the country's banking, travel and trade. The vote on the resolution drafted by the United States and China came hours after the reclusive country warned for the first time it would launch pre-emptive nuclear attacks on the United States and South Korea, The New York Times reported. "The strength, breadth and severity of these sanctions will raise the cost to North Korea of its illicit nuclear program," said Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "Taken together, these sanctions will bite and bite hard." Li Baodong, the U.N. ambassador from China, said the resolution had a long-term goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. China is the last ally of North Korea, which expressed anger at the country's move. "This resolution is a very important step," he said after the vote. South Korea's Yonhap news agency said a draft it received of the U.N. sanctions resolution included three North Korean weapons dealers and two entities, and called for mandatory inspections of North Korean ships and aircraft suspected of carrying banned items, including luxury goods. It "calls upon states to deny permission to any aircraft to take off from, land in or overfly their territory, if they have information that provides reasonable grounds to believe that the aircraft contains items" that have been banned under previous U.N. resolutions, Yonhap reported. The Security Council also called on countries to "exercise enhanced vigilance over DPRK diplomatic personnel so as to prevent such individuals from contributing to the DPRK's nuclear or ballistic missile programs," the draft said. In Pyongyang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said the resolution "will compel the DPRK [the Democratic People's Republic of Korea] to take at an earlier date more powerful second and third countermeasures as it had declared." North Korea has escalated its threats against the United States and its allies in the last few days, stating it nullified the 1953 agreement that ended the Korean conflict and threatening to turn Washington and Seoul into "a sea in flames" with "lighter and smaller nukes." Pyongyang claims it has the right to launch pre-emptive military strikes against the United States because the United States was preparing to start a war on the Korean Peninsula, the Times said. In its statement Thursday, North Korea discussed pre-emptive nuclear strikes for the first time, citing U.S.-South Korean military exercises as proof preparations for "a nuclear war aimed to mount a pre-emptive strike" on North Korea were under way. "Now that the U.S. is set to light a fuse for a nuclear war, the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK will exercise the right to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors and to defend the supreme interests of the country," the Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement carried by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency. The spokesman said North Korea was no longer bound by the 1953 cease-fire ending the Korean conflict and its military was free to "take military actions for self-defense against any target any moment." The spokesman urged the Security Council "not to make another big blunder like the one in the past when it earned inveterate grudge of the Korean nation by acting as a war servant for the U.S. in 1950."