Delay lets Kim increase his nuclear stockpile North Korea
North Korea has acquired material for ten more nuclear bombs in the 18 months that de-nuclearisation talks with the United States have been dragging on, giving it enough for 40 in total, according to the former head of America’s nuclear laboratory.
Siegfried Hecker warns in an essay written with other experts on North Korea that President Donald Trump’s diplomatic engagement with Kim Jong-un is at a crucial stage and that delay is allowing the rogue state to increase its nuclear stockpile. The authors urge the US government to abandon demands for a comprehensive deal, which scuttled a summit between Trump and Kim in February, and to settle instead for a series of smaller, incremental steps that would gradually build trust.
‘‘The [diplomatic] process is now on life support, with time and circumstances working against it,’’ they write on the 38 North website run by the Stimson Centre think tank in Washington. ‘‘The longer the United States waits for what it thinks is a better deal, the more it risks that the opportunity for such action will slip away – and that future negotiators will face an even tougher predicament, with much more advanced [North Korean] nuclear and missile capabilities.’’
In 2010 Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, became one of the few foreigners to have entered the stronghold of North Korea’s nuclear programme, its nuclear power plant at Yongbyon, which produces the ingredients for its nuclear warheads.
In September 2017 North Korea carried out its sixth and largest nuclear test so far. The device was as powerful as a hydrogen bomb, with more than ten times the energy of the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soon afterwards, it successfully test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile able to reach the US mainland. Since then, following a shift to diplomacy with South Korea and the US, Kim, below, has kept a promise made to Trump at their first summit in Singapore last year not to test any more nuclear bombs or ballistic missiles. After the failure of the second summit in Vietnam in February, and despite a third brief meeting in South Korea in June, however, diplomacy has stalled.
Based on the capacities of Yongbyon, however, Hecker believes that the north has continued to manufacture warheads. ‘‘Over the past 18 months it has likely added about ten bombs’ worth of fissile material to the roughly 30 bombs’ worth it possessed in late 2017,’’ he writes. The Vietnam talks failed after Trump’s insistence on an ‘‘all or nothing’’ agreement on denuclearisation, by which the North Koreans would give up their nuclear arsenal and all stocks of chemical and biological weapons.
Kim said that the two sides must first build trust through a series of lesser agreements. He offered to close the Yongbyon plant in return for the partial removal of international economic sanctions but Trump refused.
The two leaders left Hanoi on good terms, personally at least, and met again in June at the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. But despite agreeing to hold future talks, no further meetings have taken place.
‘‘Washington continues to profess an interest in returning to the negotiating table but has not adopted a new approach with potential for progress, while Pyongyang appears increasingly uninterested in even sitting down at the table,’’ Hecker wrote. – The Times
‘‘The [diplomatic] process is now on life support, with time and circumstances working against it.’’