‘North Korea capable of making nuclear bomb every 6 weeks’

PYONGYANG: Behind the Trump administration’s sudden urgency in dealing with the North Korean nuclear crisis lies a stark calculus: a growing body of expert studies and classified intelligence reports that conclude the country is capable of producing a nuclear bomb every six or seven weeks.

That acceleration in pace — impossible to verify until experts get beyond the limited access to North Korean facilities that ended years ago — explains why President Donald Trump and his aides fear they are running out of time. For years, American presidents decided that each incremental improvement in the North’s programme — another nuclear test, a new variant of a missile — was worrisome, but not worth a confrontation that could spill into open conflict. Now those step-by-step advances have resulted in North Korean warheads that in a few years could reach Seattle. “They’ve learned a lot,” said Siegfried S. Hecker, a Stanford professor who directed the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, birthplace of the atomic bomb, from 1986 to 1997, and whom the N Koreans have let into their facilities seven times. N Korea is threatening another nuclear test, which would be its sixth in 11 years.

The last three tests — the most recent was in September — generated Hiroshima-size explosions. It is unclear how Trump would react to a test, but he told representatives of the UN Security Council at the White House on Monday that they should be prepared to pass far more restrictive sanctions, which US officials say should include cutting off energy supplies.

“People have put blindfolds on for decades, and now it’s time to solve the problem,” Trump said. He made his remarks after a Sunday night phone call on North Korea with Xi Jinping, China’s president, who urged Trump to show “restraint” with North Korea, according to a Chinese television report. White House officials said little about the call, and aides are trying to use Trump’s unpredictability to the greatest advantage, hoping it will keep the Chinese off balance and deter the North Koreans. Inside the CIA, they call it “the disco ball.”

It is a round, metallic sphere, covered by small circles, that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, is shown caressing in official photographs as if it were his crown jewel. And it may be: The sphere is supposedly a nuclear weapon, shrunken to fit inside the nose cone of one of the country’s growing arsenal of missiles. US intelligence officials still debate whether it is a real bomb or a mock-up that is part of the country’s vast propaganda effort. But it is intended to show where the country is headed. Unless something changes, N Korea’s arsenal may well hit 50 weapons by the end of Trump’s term, about half the size of Pakistan’s. US officials say the North knows how to shrink those weapons so they can fit atop one of its short- to medium-range missiles — putting S Korea and Japan, and the thousands of US troops deployed in those two nations, within range. The best estimates are that North Korea has roughly 1,000 ballistic missiles in eight or so varieties. But fulfilling Kim’s dream putting a nuclear weapon atop an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach Seattle or Los Angeles, or one day New York remains a more complex problem. PARIS: French far-right veteran Jean-marie Le Pen said on Tuesday his daughter Marine, who faces centrist Emmanuel Macron in a May 7 presidential runoff, should have campaigned more aggressively for Sunday’s first round, following the example of Donald Trump.

With 7.5 million votes, Marine Le Pen beat the National Front party’s previous election record on Sunday but failed to pip pro-eu Macron to the first place.the intervention by her father follows her announcement on Monday that she plans to step back from day-to-day management of the far-right party he founded ahead of the runoff and marks the latest tussle between the two of them over its future direction.“i think her campaign was too laidback. If I’d been in her place I would have had a Trump-like campaign, a more open one, very aggressive against those responsible for the decadence of our country, whether left or right,” 88-year-old Jean-marie Le Pen told RTL radio.

The two have been at odds since Marine Le Pen launched moves to clean the National Front’s image of xenophobic associations in the run-up to the campaign for the 2017 presidency. Jean-marie Le Pen shocked the world in 2002 by qualifying for the second round of the presidential election and then went on to lose in a landslide to conservative Jacques Chirac.

He was frequently accused of making xenophobic and anti-semitic statements and Le Pen expelled him from the party in 2015, though as the party’s founder he remains a well-known figure and represents a body of opinion in the party.in another sign of his influence, the National Front has borrowed about 6 million euros from a political fundraising association he heads. Marine Le Pen’s decision to take a leave of absence from the day-to-day management of the party appeared to be an attempt to portray herself as being above the narrow world of National Front politics and broaden her appeal to the wider electorate ahead of the crucial runoff vote.

Her program calls for sharp curbs on immigration and on the rights of immigrants living in France, as well as the expulsion of foreigners under suspicion of having militant Islamist links.

But she is seeking all the same to distance herself from the toxic legacy of her father and the xenophobic and antisemitic undertones of his previous campaigns. Under France’s Fifth Republic, the president is the head of state, very much like a monarch in other countries, a role described by founder Charles De Gaulle as being above party politics - something Le Pen may have had in mind. WASHINGTON: The southern state of Arkansas, rushing to execute several inmates before a lethal drug expires next week, put to death two inmates, the first double execution in the United States in 17 years.

Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge said that Jack Jones and Marcel Williams, both sentenced to death in the 1990s, were executed by lethal injection after higher courts rejected their final legal appeals. Arkansas had planned to put eight convicted murderers to death in 11 days — a record, had it been carried out — but four have won reprieves.

Jones, 52, was executed after the US Supreme Court rejected an 11th-hour request from his attorneys asking justices to reconsider a procedural issue from his trial.

Williams, 46, died hours later after his appeals were exhausted. His lawyers had filed a string of last-minute challenges, which included allegations that Jones suffered unnecessarily because he was executed improperly, and that Williams was so obese that it would be hard to find a proper vein for the lethal injection.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson has said the accelerated execution timetable was necessary as the state’s stock of a sedative used in lethal injections will expire at the end of the month.

Rutledge said in a separate statements that the family and friends of the victims had “seen justice carried out”. The execution process began at 7:06 pm (0006 GMT Tuesday) and Jones was pronounced dead at 7:20 pm, the Arkansas Democrat-gazette newspaper cited Department of Correction spokesman Solomon Graves as saying.

Jones was calm as he made a rambling final statement while strapped to the gurney, saying he tried to become a better person and apologizing to Lacey, a daughter of Jones’s victim, 34-yearold Mary Phillips, the paper said, citing media witnesses in the death chamber.

Three hours later the lethal injection process began on Williams, who according to the newspaper refused to make a final statement. He was pronounced dead at 10:33 pm (0333 GMT).LAST minute appeals had delayed the execution, which had been scheduled for one hour after Jones’s execution.

Last week, on Thursday, Ledell Lee was put to death in the state’s first execution in more than a decade. Many of the legal clashes over Arkansas’s plan focus on use of the drug midazolam, a sedative meant to render a condemned person unconscious before other drugs induce death.

Critics say it does not always adequately sedate prisoners, potentially causing undue suffering.

And Mckesson MedicalSurgical, a distributor for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, had asked courts to ban the use of a paralytic it sells, vecuronium bromide, in the chemical cocktail used to kill prisoners. Arkansas has scheduled another execution for April 27.

The last US state to execute two convicts in one night was Texas in August 2000.