09 September, 2017
It was not immediately clear if the draft resolution had the support of North Korean ally China.
As North Korea continues to plan for more weapons tests and display of military strength, the US believes that these measures will overall help in depriving the Asian country of revenue to pursue its military programmes.
The US had indicated that if the resolution is not passed when the Security Council meets next Monday it may impose its own sanctions unilaterally.
Commercial satellite imagery, obtained the day after the test, appears to show numerous landslides throughout the nuclear test site and beyond, according to an analyst report on the 38 North website.
Countries would also be banned from "hiring and paying of DPRK laborers", with all work authorizations prohibited to North Koreans unless their work is related to humanitarian assistance, denuclearization, or specific tasks linked to prior UN Resolutions.
It was the second time this year that North Korea had embarrassed China with a nuclear test just as Beijing was preparing to hold an global summit.
Japan's Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said Wednesday that the explosion was 10 times more powerful than the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in the final days of World War II.
The draft text comes two days after Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called for the "strongest possible measures" to be imposed on North Korea.
"Enough is enough", she said. "We must now adopt the strongest possible measures".
Chief among this is his failure to mention that the North's invasion of the South was abetted by its ideological allies- China and, to a lesser extent, the then Soviet Union - in their joint bid to transform the Korean Peninsula into a sea of communist red during the Cold War.
Those threats have prompted both Beijing and Moscow to agree on increasingly tougher sanctions against North Korea, most recently backing a Security Council ban of the country's coal, iron, iron ore, lead and seafood exports.
The North is presumed to import around 1 million tons of fuel from China and 300,000-400,000 tons from Russian Federation annually.
Despite its resentment at the pressure North Korea's actions have put it under, Beijing refrains from taking too hard a line.
The outlook does not seem good for aggressive measures, such as an oil embargo, to be adopted as Washington wishes. "He's just a great guy", he said after a 2013 visit. Following a regime change, China would lose its northern buffer, and the USA and its ally South Korea would be at its doorstep.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in sought to find common ground with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to prevent the situation on the Korean peninsula from spinning out of control.
