North Korea may be only months away from being able to strike the United States with a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile and its atomic weapons programme must be shut down, a senior US disarmament official has said.
US disarmament ambassador Robert Wood, addressing the UN-sponsored Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, also warned that arsenals in China and Russia were expanding.
"Russia, China and North Korea are growing their stockpiles, increasing the prominence of nuclear weapons in their security strategies, and - in some cases - pursuing the development of new nuclear capabilities to threaten other peaceful nations," he said.
North Korea "may now be only months away from the capability to strike the US with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles".
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Meanwhile, the Kremlin has said it is Russia's sovereign right to decide where it deploys its military resources on its own territory following reports that Russia had deployed nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad.
The RIA news agency quoted a senior lawmaker as saying yesterday that Moscow had deployed the advanced missiles to its Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic Sea.
Speaking on a conference call with reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not say if the missile systems had been deployed to Kaliningrad region.
But he said: "The deployment of one weapon or another, the deployment of military units and so forth on Russian territory is exclusively a sovereign issue for the Russian Federation.
"Russia has never threatened anyone and is not threatening anyone. Naturally Russia has this sovereign right. It should hardly be cause for anyone to worry."
