As N. Korea bombs advance, U.S. fears time is running out
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 Hecker, a Stanford professor who directed the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, birthplace of the atomic bomb, from 1986 to 1997, and who was allowed into the North Korean facilities seven times.
North Korea launched a missile Saturday, even as the United States and China had been seeking to curb the North’s military ambitions. But the test ended in failure, the South Korean military said. It was the second consecutive failure in the past two weeks.
The missile took off from a location near Pukchang, northeast of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, the South Korean military said in a statement. It did not identify what type of missile was launched.
Cmdr. Dave Benham, a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command, said the American military had “detected what we assess was a North Korean missile launch” from near the Pukchang airfield.
“The missile did not leave North Korean territory,” Cmdr. Benham added. “The North American Aerospace Defense Command determined the missile launch from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America.”
It was the North’s first test since the government of Kim Jong Un launched a ballistic missile near its submarine base on North Korea’s east coast April 16. That launch was also a failure, with the projectile exploding just after liftoff.
In a statement, the White House said that Mr. Trump had been briefed on the launch.
Mr. Trump said on Twitter: “North Korea disrespected the wishes of China & its highly respected President when it launched, though unsuccessfully, a missile today. [ Saturday]Bad!”
Mr. Trump reiterated his position in an interview to be aired today that he believes China’s president has been putting pressure on North Korea as it pursues its missile and nuclear weapons programs.
In an interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Mr. Trump said he won’t be happy if North Korea conducts a nuclear test and that he believes Chinese President Xi Jinping won’t be happy, either.
Asked if that means military action, Mr. Trump responded: “I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see.”
The test on Saturday came hours after Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson led a ministerial meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Friday. Referring to North Korea’s advancing nuclear and missile programs, Mr. Tillerson warned that “failing to act now on the most pressing security issue in the world may bring catastrophic consequences.”
The world has been watching North Korea closely in the past several weeks, amid fear that the country might attempt its sixth underground nuclear test. Satellite imagery of the nuclear test site in the country’s northeast showed that the North was ready for a test, analysts said.
But the country has so far refrained from conducting a nuclear test or launching one of its intercontinental ballistic missiles under development to mark major anniversaries in April. Instead, it celebrated those anniversaries with a military parade featuring new missiles and a massive live-fire drill.
The last three nuclear tests — the most recent was in September — generated Hiroshima-size explosions. It is unclear how Mr. Trump would react to a test, but he told representatives of the U.N. Security Council at the White House on Monday that they should be prepared to pass far more restrictive sanctions, which U.S. officials say should include cutting off energy supplies.
“People have put blindfolds on for decades, and now it’s time to solve the problem,” Mr. Trump said.
He made his remarks after a phone call about North Korea last Sunday with Mr. China’s president, who urged Mr. 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 Mr. Trump’s unpredictability to the greatest advantage, hoping it will keep the Chinese off balance and deter the North Koreans.
A growing arsenal
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.
U.S. 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, North Korea’s arsenal may well hit 50 weapons by the end of Mr. Trump’s term, about half the size of Pakistan’s. U.S. officials say the North knows how to shrink those weapons so they can fit atop one of its short- to medium-range missiles — putting South Korea and Japan, and the thousands of U.S. 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 Mr. 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.
As Mr. Hecker, a man who has built his share of nuclear weapons, noted recently, any weapon that could travel that far would have to be “smaller, lighter and surmount the additional difficulties of the stresses and temperatures” of a fiery re-entry into the atmosphere.
By most estimates, that is four or five years away. Then again, many senior officials said the same four or five years ago.
But the North has come further than most experts expected since the infancy of its program in the 1950s, when the Soviet Union began training North Korean scientists in nuclear basics.
It took three decades for the North to assemble the technology it needed to make its own bomb fuel. Finally, from a reactor at Yongbyon, it succeeded in making plutonium: enough for about one atomic bomb a year.
The first North Korean nuclear crisis, in 1994, ended in an agreement with the Clinton administration to freeze the North’s production facilities in return for oil and peaceful reactors. It fell apart early in the George W. Bush administration. In 2006, the first test explosion, while unimpressive, entered North Korea into the club of nuclear powers. Analysts say the first blast was a plutonium bomb, as was a second detonation just months into the Obama administration in 2009.
Mr. Hecker visited Yongbyon in 2010, and the North Koreans showed him a complete uranium enrichment facility, which U.S. intelligence agencies had missed. The message was clear: The North now had two pathways to a bomb, uranium and plutonium. Today, it has an arsenal made up of both, intelligence officials believe.
And it is aiming for something much bigger: a hydrogen bomb, with a destructive force up to 1,000 times greater than ordinary nuclear weapons. That is exactly the path the U.S. took in the 1950s.
Recently, U.N. investigators found evidence that the North’s factories had succeeded in producing lithium 6, a rare ingredient needed to make thermonuclear fuel. Gregory S. Jones, a scientist at Rand Corp., said the North might have used bits of thermonuclear fuel in its 2016 detonations.
A potential clue, analysts said, is that the North’s five blasts during the past decade have grown steadily more destructive.
The strategy emerging from Mr. Trump’s national security team comes down to this: Apply overwhelming pressure on the North, both military and economic, to freeze its testing and reduce its stockpile. Then use that opening to negotiate, with the ultimate goal of getting the North Koreans to give up all their weapons.
Many experts, however, believe that is a fantasy, because Mr. Kim regards even a small arsenal as critical to his survival. The upside of the strategy, if it works, is that the “nuclear freeze” would delay for years the day the North can fit a small, reliable, well-tested weapon atop a large, reliable, well-tested missile. The downside is that it would leave the North Koreans with a small, potent arsenal.