nuclear warhead 復習
北朝鮮でマグニチュード5.0の揺れが観測され、核実験が行われた可能性があると報じられています。
Japan warns of growing North Korea threat after fifth nuclear test
North Korea conducted its fifth and most powerful nuclear test to date around 9:30 a.m. Friday, prompting Tokyo to immediately file a protest amid concerns over accelerating developments in the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile technologies.
Tokyo lodged the protest through its embassy in Beijing, saying the test posed a “grave threat” to Japan, the region and international society, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference.
The United States and Japan are jointly urging the United Nations Security Council to convene an emergency meeting to condemn the North, Suga said.
“Scientists and technicians of the DPRK carried out a nuclear explosion test for the judgment of the power of a nuclear warhead newly studied and manufactured by them at the northern nuclear test ground,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Friday.
DPRK is the acronym for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the formal English name of North Korea.
“The nuclear test finally examined and confirmed the structure and specific features of movement of nuclear warhead that has been standardized to be able to be mounted on strategic ballistic rockets,” the KCNA claimed.
Pyongyang is known for its regular use of overblown rhetoric and few experts take any of its official statements at face value.
But the country is believed to already possess dozens of intermediate ballistic missiles that can directly hit Japan, and to have already conducted five nuclear explosion tests so far.
If Pyongyang succeeds in producing a nuclear warhead small enough to be mounted on those ballistic missiles, the threat to Japan, and possibly to the U.S. as well, will dramatically increase.
On Friday, Defense Minister Tomomi Inada did not rule out such a scenario for Tokyo.
“You cannot deny North Korea might have managed to make a nuclear warhead small enough to fit a ballistic missile,” Inada said.
Later in the day, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held a teleconference with U.S. President Barack Obama, who was aboard Air Force One on his way home from Laos.
During the 10-minute conversation, Obama told Abe he wants to make clear to Japan that the U.S. commitment to defend Japan is “unshakable,” according to a senior Japanese official who briefed reporters in Tokyo.
Japan is a military ally to the U.S., which is obliged under a bilateral security treaty to defend Japan if it is attacked by a third country.
Abe, meanwhile, told Obama that the nuclear test violates U.N. Security Council resolutions and is totally unacceptable to Japan.
以下略
取り上げる表現は"nuclear warhead"です。
そのまま直訳すると、「核の戦争の頭」となりますが、それでは意味が通りません。
『ジーニアス英和辞典』第4版(大修館)で"warhead"を引いてみると、「(ミサイル、魚雷などの)実弾頭」と載っていました。
LDOCEでは"the explosive part at the front of a missile" と表現されており、ミサイルの爆発する部分を指していることが分かりました。
以上より、ここでは「核弾頭」という意味になります。
着実にミサイルの性能を上げてきている北朝鮮に、日本やその他関係国は警戒の念が強まっていると同時に憤りを感じています。(Akim)
