(CNSNews.com) – President Obama is on track to accomplish in his first year of office what President Carter took three years to achieve – portray the United States as a “confused and soft power,” an Asian security expert charged after North Korea reported a nuclear weapons test Monday.
 
Citing its approach to North Korea, Iran, South Asia, the Middle East, China and Burma, veteran India-based analyst Bahukutumbi Raman said the new administration was giving the impression that it lacks the will to respond decisively if "problem states" act in ways detrimental to U.S. interests and international peace and security.
 
As reaction poured in from around the world to the nuclear test and the United Nations Security Council held urgent talks, analysts advised responses including more comprehensive sanctions, stepping up missile defense development, returning Pyongyang to the U.S. list of terror-sponsoring states – and even moving to have it expelled from the U.N.
 
The underground test was North Korea’s second, but the device detonated was believed to have had an explosive yield around ten times bigger than in the case of the October 2006 test, according to nuclear physicist Martin Kalinowski of the University of Hamburg. The Russian defense ministry’s estimate put the yield at 20-40 times larger than that of the first attempt, which would approximate the 15 kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
 
The Vienna-based organization preparing for the entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) said the explosion measured 4.52 on the Richter scale compared to 4.1 in 2006; it was detected by 23 seismic stations around the world, from south-east Russia to Texas, compared to 13 last time.
 
“Now the worry is not whether or not North Korea can make a workable weapon but how long it will take before it can launch it from one of its missiles,” Nonproliferation Policy Education Center executive director Henry Sokolski argued in a commentary.
 
After its meeting Monday, the U.N. Security Council issued a statement condemning the test, and said it was beginning work immediately on a new resolution.
 
The test violates Security Council resolutions 1695 and 1718, passed before and after the Stalinist regime’s first test. When the Kim Jong-il regime launched a long-range missile last month – another action prohibited by both resolutions – the council struggled to come up with a tough and unified position.
 
Although Obama declared in response to the launch that “rules must be binding, violations must be punished,” a week of Security Council deliberations ended with a condemnatory but non-binding statement.
 
The administration’s attempt to paint the outcome as a success was not helped by the fact that Obama’s special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, had told a briefing in Washington shortly before the anticipated launch that “pressure is not the most productive line of approach” with the North Koreans.

The council’s failure to agree on a resolution was attributed to opposition by veto-wielding permanent members China and Russia, North Korea’s traditional allies and participants in the “six-party” talks which since 2003 have sought to resolve the nuclear dispute.
 
Both were quick to voice concern about Monday’s test, although Russia’s foreign ministry added that Moscow still believed the problem could only be solved at the six-way negotiations.
 
China has hosted multiple rounds of the talks in Beijing and its stance in the coming days will be especially closely watched.
 
Council for Foreign Relations senior fellow Sheila Smith said while it was imperative that the U.S. makes it clear it will not accept a nuclear North Korea, the nuclear test was also “a moment of truth” for China.
 
Smith said in an interview on the CFR Web site that North Korea had placed China in a position where it would be very difficult for Beijing not to support sanctions.
 
“It is not only China’s responsibility to regional stability which it claims a very strong interest in, of course, but it also claims a global commitment to nonproliferation,” she said.
 
Heritage Foundation scholar Bruce Klingner said the U.S. and its regional allies, six-party members South Korea and Japan, should demand that China and Russia agree to stronger punitive measures.
 
The U.S., he said, should also stop “the charade” of praising China’s six-party role and “instead criticize its obstructionism to carrying out the will of the international community as expressed in two U.N. resolutions.”
 
Klingner said North Korea appeared to have shifted its objectives, noting a succession of provocations carried out by the regime year without giving the U.S. and others time to offer new inducements, as was its past practice.
 
“It is evident that Pyongyang is now intent on achieving strategic technological achievements rather than gaining tactical negotiating leverage,” he said.
 
Klingner said North Korea’s behavior underscored the need to continue developing and deploying missile defense shields.
 
‘Impunity’
 
John Bolton, a top arms control official in the Bush administration and former ambassador to the U.N., said the U.S. government should return North Korea to the terror-sponsor list. Bolton was a strong critic of President Bush’s decision to remove it from the list last October, in return for progress at the time in the six-party process.
 
“I think this incident really is that famous 3 a.m. call that the presidential candidates debated last year,” Bolton told Fox News.
 
He said the U.S. should press for “sweeping” sanctions against Pyongyang like those imposed on Iraq when it invaded Kuwait in 1991.
 
And North Korea should also be kicked out of the U.N., Bolton added. He cited article six of chapter two of the U.N. Charter, which says a member may be expelled for “persistently” violating the charter’s principles.
 
Raman, director of the Institute For Topical Studies in the Indian city of Chennai and a former intelligence service officer, said that whatever hesitation there may have been in North Korean policy-making circles about the new American administration, it has now disappeared.
 
“Its leadership now feels it can defy the U.S. and the international community with impunity,” he said.
 
“President Obama cannot blame the problem states of the world such as Iran, Pakistan, Myanmar and North Korea if they have come to the conclusion that they can take liberties with the present administration in Washington DC without having to fear any adverse consequences,” Raman said.
 
“North Korea’s defiance is only the beginning. One has every reason to apprehend that Iran might be the next to follow.”
 
Raman said Carter had taken “a little over three years to create the image of the U.S. as a confused and soft power. Obama is bidding fair to create that image even in his first year in office.”