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Seoul. One day after a surprise nuclear test drew angry and widespread condemnation, North Korea continued its defiance of the international community on Tuesday by test-firing two more short-range missiles, a South Korean government official said.

The missile firings came just hours after South Korea said it would join an American-led operation to stop the global trafficking in weapons of mass destruction, an action the North has previously said it would consider a declaration of war.

The missiles launched on Tuesday were surface-to-ship and surface-to-air projectiles, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.

The South Korean news agency Yonhap said the missiles each had a range of 80 miles. They were apparently launched from a base on the central eastern coast into the sea opposite Japan, further rattling nerves in the region. The South Korean Defense Ministry declined to confirm the report.

After its nuclear test on Monday, the North test-fired three short-range missiles, also off its east coast.

An intelligence official in Seoul said the move indicated that Pyongyang was “getting its back up” about the possibility that United States military aircraft would fly close to North Korea in an attempt to collect radiation data from the nuclear blast.

South Korea’s long-delayed participation in the Proliferation Security Initiative, the anti-weapons of mass destruction trafficking program, followed a statement on Monday by the United Nations Security Council that unanimously condemned the nuclear test.

The council called it a “clear violation” of a previous resolution and also vowed to craft a new resolution that could impose further sanctions on the increasingly isolated North.

In Japan, the lower house of Parliament unanimously adopted a resolution on Tuesday condemning the North’s nuclear test — its second after an apparently smaller test in 2006 — and threatening to step up sanctions against the communist regime.

“Japan, as the world’s only nation to ever suffer a nuclear attack, cannot condone” North Korea’s repeated nuclear tests, the resolution said.

North Korea’s recent belligerence has also prompted Japan’s ruling party to debate whether Tokyo should consider preemptive strikes against states considered hostile — actions that would likely require changes to Japan’s pacifist Constitution.

North Korea appeared unfazed by the world’s condemnation, which included strong rebukes from allies such as China and Russia. In Tuesday’s editions of Rodong, its main party newspaper, Pyongyang declared that it was “fully ready for battle” against the United States, accusing President Obama of “following in the footsteps of the previous Bush administration’s reckless policy of militarily stifling North Korea.”

North Korean officials have said that South Korea’s full membership in the antiproliferation initiative would be seen as a “declaration of undisguised confrontation and a declaration of a war.”

The international effort was begun in 2003 by the Bush administration in order to interdict shipments — especially at sea — of suspected weapons of mass destruction, their related materials and delivery systems.

Russia, Britain, France and Israel are among the 95 signatories to the initiative, to which India, Pakistan and China did not sign on.

South Korea decided to join the initiative to “counter the grave threat that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missiles poses to global peace and security,” Moon Tae-young, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said on Tuesday in a statement.

North Korea has called such interdictions “terrorism” and sees the initiative, which is largely aimed at its weapons sales, as proof of American bias.

North Korean exports of missile parts to countries in the Middle East, particularly Iran, remain a key source of revenue for the impoverished nation.

South Korea had wavered on joining the initiative for fear of provoking the North.

But on Tuesday, President Lee Myung-bak, who came to power with a promise to take a tougher approach toward Pyongyang, spoke with Obama about the North Korean threat and the South’s decision to finally join the effort.

On the phone, Lee emphasized to Obama that the United States and its allies “should not repeat the pattern” of “rewarding” North Korea’s provocations with dialogue and economic aid, as they did after the North’s first nuclear test in October 2006.


The New York Times