North Korea's first nuclear test in October 2006 confirmed the fears of those who had watched it withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons three years earlier: Pyongyang was steaming ahead on a quest for a deliverable nuclear-weapons capability. The UN Security Council reacted swiftly to the development, acknowledging that other approaches - including the so-called 'Six-Party Talks' between North Korea, South Korea, Japan, the US, China and Russia - had not succeeded in preventing it. 'All of us find ourselves in an extraordinary situation, which requires the adoption of extraordinary measures', Russia's representative on the Security Council noted. The US agreed that it constituted 'one of the gravest threats to international peace and security that [the Security] Council has ever had to confront'. China called the move 'brazen', a term it reserves for its harshest condemnations.
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