The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Anxiety grows over North Korea’s arsenal
On the day of North Korea’s first atomic test in 2006, aides to President George W. Bush began phoning foreign capitals to reassure allies startled by Pyongyang’s surprising feat. The test, aides said, had been mostly a failure: a botched, 1-kiloton cry for attention from a regime that had no warheads or reliable delivery systems and would never be allowed to obtain them.
“The current course that they are on is unacceptable,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said publicly at the time, “and the international community is going to act.”
A decade later, that confidence has all but evaporated. After a week in which Pyongyang successfully lobbed four intermediaterange missiles into the Sea of Japan, U.S. officials are no longer seeing North Korea’s weapons tests as amateurish, attention-grabbing provocations. Instead, they are viewed as evidence of a rapidly growing threat - and one that increasingly defies solution.
Over the past year, technological advances in North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs have dramatically raised the stakes in the years-long standoff between the United States and the reclusive communist regime, according to current and former U.S. officials and Korea experts. Pyongyang’s growing arsenal has rattled key U.S. allies and spurred efforts by all sides to develop new first-strike capabilities, increasing the risk that a simple mistake could trigger a devastating regional war, the analysts said.
The military developments are coming at a time of unusual political ferment, with a new and largely untested administration in Washington and with South Korea’s government coping with an impeachment crisis. Longtime observers say the risk of conflict is higher than it has been in years, and likely to rise further as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un seeks to fulfill his pledge to field long-range missiles capable of striking U.S. cities.
“This is no longer about a lonely dictator crying for attention or demanding negotiations,” said Victor Cha, a former adviser on North Korea to the Bush administration and the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “This is a now a military testing program to acquire a proven capability.”
Pyongyang’s ambition to become an advanced nuclear-armed state is not new. North Korea began building its first reactor for making plutonium more than three decades ago. Over the years, it has shown ingenuity in increasing the range and power of a stockpile of homemade short- and medium-range missiles, all based on Soviet-era designs.
Often, in the past, the new innovations have been accompanied by demands: a clamoring for security guarantees and international respect by a paranoid and nearly friendless government that perceives its democratic neighbors as plotting its destruction. After the first atomic test in 2006, then-leader Kim Jong Il threatened to launch nuclear missiles unless Washington agreed to face-toface talks.
North Korea has been slammed instead with evertighter United Nations sanctions meant to cut off access to technology and foreign cash flows. Yet, in spite of the trade restrictions, diplomatic isolation, threats and occasional sabotage, the country’s weapons programs have continued their upward march, goaded forward by a succession of dictators willing to sacrifice their citizens’ well-being to grow the country’s military might.
And now, in the fifth year of Kim Jong Un’s rule, progress is coming in leaps. --Pyongyang’s fifth and latest nuclear weapons test occurred on Sept. 9 on the 68th anniversary of North Korea’s founding. As usual, seismic monitoring stations picked up vibrations from the underground blast and quickly determined that this one was exceptional.
Scientific analyses of the test determined that the new bomb’s explosive yield approached 30 kilotons, two times the force of the “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. The device was twice as powerful as the bomb North Korea tested just nine months earlier, and 30 times stronger than one detonated in 2006 in a remote mountain tunnel. More ominously, North Korea last March displayed a new compact bomb design, one that appears small enough to fit inside the nose cone of one of its indigenously produced missiles.
Regardless of whether the miniature bomb is real or a clever prop, North Korea does finally appear to be “on the verge of a nuclear breakout,” said Robert Litwak, an expert on nuclear proliferation and director of International Security Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He said Pyongyang’s arsenal is believed to now contain as many as 20 nuclear bombs, along with enough plutonium and highly enriched uranium to make dozens more.
“When I got into this field,” Litwak said at a North Korean symposium this month, “I couldn’t have conceived of North Korea acquiring a nuclear arsenal approaching half the size of Great Britain’s.”
The country’s missiles also have grown more sophisticated. Last year, North Korea’s military conducted the first test of a two-stage ballistic missile that uses solid fuel - a significant advance over the country’s existing liquid-fueled rockets because they can be moved easily and launched quickly. Also in 2016, North Korea broadcast images of engineers testing engines for a new class of advanced missiles with true intercontinental range, potentially putting cities in the U.S. mainland within reach.
The provocations have continued in the weeks since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who, just before taking office, appeared to taunt Pyongyang in a Twitter posting, saying that North Korea’s plan for building intercontinental ballistic missiles “won’t happen.”
A month later, Kim launched one of the country’s new solid-fuel missiles, interrupting Trump’s Mar-a-Lago dinner with visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Last week’s coordinated launch of four intermediate-range missiles appeared intended to showcase the country’s ability to fire multiple rockets simultaneously at U.S. military bases in Japan, increasingly the likelihood that some will penetrate anti-missile shields.
North Korea’s state-run media have occasionally shown propaganda footage of Kim huddling with his generals over what some analysts have jokingly called the “map of death”: a chart that portrays Japanese and U.S. mainland cities as potential targets.
The laughter has now stopped, said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korean weapons systems. “This idea that these things were just bargaining chips - something that was true years ago - is superseded by the fact that there is now a rocket force...with a commander and a headquarters and subordinate bases, all with missiles,” said Lewis, director of East Asian program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “This is now a living, breathing thing.”
There have been notable failures as well. Numerous test rockets have drifted far off course, and others never made it off the launch pad. Many analysts believe it could still be several years before Kim can construct a true ICBM that could reliably reach the U.S. mainland, and perhaps longer before he can demonstrate an ability to incorporate a nuclear payload into his rocket design. Yet, already, the basic components for a future arsenal of longrange, nuclear tipped missiles already are in place, Lewis said.