North Korea still mastering how to deliver a nuke
WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence officials are pretty sure North Korea can put a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental missile that could reach the United States. But experts aren’t convinced the bomb could make it all that way intact.
They cite lingering questions about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s nuclear know-how.
“I don’t think North Korea has a good measure of how accurate the missile is at this point,” said Michael Elleman, an expert with the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “They don’t know if the re-entry technologies will really hold up — whether the bomb will survive the trip.”
North Korea has shortrange missiles that can hit its neighbors. It has tested an intermediate one that could strike Guam, a U.S. territory, as well as a longer-range missile that could reach Hawaii and perhaps the U.S. West Coast. The intermediate and long-range missiles are still being developed and it’s still questionable whether they can reliably strike targets.
The North must conduct more tests to master what is known as “re-entry” in missile parlance, experts believe. The process involves shielding a nuclear warhead from the high temperatures and force it faces when it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere at about 15,500 mph (7 kilometers a second).
“In principle, Kim Jong Un could hit the United States with a nuclear weapon,” said Elleman, a former scientist at Lockheed Martin’s Research and Development Laboratory who also worked as missile expert for U.N. weapons inspection missions. “In practice, I think they are probably a half-year to a full year away from having something that will work more often than it would fail.”
Joseph Bermudez Jr., an internationally recognized expert on North Korean defense and intelligence affairs and ballistic missile development, agrees.
“Putting these things all together and making them work is extremely challenging, and they haven’t yet demonstrated a capability to produce a reliable re-entry vehicle, which is what houses the actual nuclear device,” he said. “Remember, they’ve only tested these systems very few times.”
Still, Bermudez, said, North Korea is “on track” to figure it out.
U.S. officials also think it’s just a matter of time before Kim’s program fully matures.
National Intelligence Director Dan Coats told Congress in May that Kim has been photographed beside a nuclear warhead design and missile airframes to show that North Korea has warheads small enough to fit on a missile.
That same month, Lt. Gen Vincent Stewart, the Defense Intelligence Agency director, told lawmakers that while Kim must still work on the technical aspects of re-entry, it’s only a “matter of enough trial and error to make that work. They understand the physics, so it’s just a matter of design.”