"I was just surprised," she said. "It's just so stupid."

But members of her family who still live in South Korea took it in stride, she said, as her 3-year-old son, Tyson, ran around the parking lot of The Oriental Food Market in Salt Lake City on Monday shaking a Korean newspaper.

"[My family] expected that," Shelley said. "They used to get nervous and afraid of that, but they just knew that they were going to do it."

North Korea announced Sunday that it had performed its first nuclear weapons test, an underground explosion that defied international warnings.

In 2000, there were 4,609 people of Korean descent in Utah, according to the U.S. census. They make up one of the smallest Asian communities statewide, only about 2.4 percent of Utah's population.

Steve Kim, a 48-year-old dentist who lives in Sandy and leads the Korean American Society of Utah, thinks North Korea is using its military and nuclear weapons as a way to eventually leverage assistance from the United States and South Korea because of its declining economy.

"If they don't have the nuclear capability, they don't have anything on the bargaining table," Kim said in a phone interview.

South Korean architectural designer Seung-Hwan Choi, who has lived in Utah for three years, said he couldn't believe North Korea would test a nuclear bomb. He thinks the United States should open a dialogue with North Korea. "That kind of action is a cry to the world . . . for economic benefit," he said.

What Choi wants to avoid seeing is another war.

"We already have a very bad war," he said. "We don't want any more military action."

Korean Times of Utah Publisher Samuel Roh said through translator and reporter Jiha Ham that he and other South Koreans in the United States and abroad are disappointed and "very afraid, of course."

Roh said North Korea's purported test has eroded chances of building a friendlier relationship with South Korea and will give Japan an excuse to increase its military power. "We don't trust [North Korea] anymore . . . ," he said. "Yesterday, everything was broken."

Roh hopes the United States and the United Nations deal with North Korea in a peaceful manner because South Korea must balance relationships with the United States and North Korea.

"If the U.S. attacks North Korea, South Korea won't know what to do," he said.

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* Tribune reporter JENNIFER SANCHEZ contributed to this story.