Mystery deepens regarding North Korea’s nuclear firepower

EARLY this month, North Korea claimed to have launched a ballistic missile from a submarine. This week it announced that it can now make nuclear warheads small enough to fit on a missile. If these are true, then it can now deliver a nuclear weapon on the US, at least in theory, but there is always doubt about North Korean claims.

While a defence official in Pyongyang said on Wednesday that the country’s nuclear programme had “long been in the full-fledged stage of miniaturisation”, some Western defence experts think the North Koreans have not really mastered the art yet. But General Curtis M Scaparrotti, the senior US military commander in South Korea, thinks otherwise.

“I believe (the North Koreans) have the capability to have miniaturised the device at this point, and they have the technology to potentially actually deliver what they say they have,” Scaparrotti said in October. But to be sure that the miniaturised weapon actually works on a ballistic missile, North Korea would have to test-fire it to see if it survives the heat and vibration of re-entering the atmosphere in working order.

Others think that the footage of the submarine launch may have been faked. The missile emerges from the sea, sure enough, with the Maximum Leader looking proudly on, but Kim Jong-un was obviously photoshopped in, and in one shot there seems to be a barge floating on the surface near the missile’s exit point.

What does North Korea intend to do with its nuclear weapons? And why is it trying so urgently to persuade its enemies that they are ready to be used now?

The rational and conventional answer to the first question is that Pyongyang’s nukes are solely intended to deter the US from using nuclear weapons on North Korea. The US has long-standing military alliances with both South Korea and Japan, and it has never said that it would abstain from using nuclear weapons if there were a war between North Korea and its neighbours.

In this rational world, having enough nuclear weapons to deter the US from going nuclear would give North Korea a major advantage in the event of a ground war in the Korean peninsula. Its army is much bigger than the South Korean and US ground forces facing it, and it might even manage to overrun South Korea in a nonnuclear war. Or at least, it may believe it could.

How many North Korean nuclear weapons would be enough to deter the US from using its own nukes, in this context? A dozen would probably do it, and Professor Siegfried Hecker, of Stanford University, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, thinks that North Korea probably now has that many, “half likely fuelled by plutonium and half by highly enriched uranium”.

But rationality has not been the outstanding feature of politics in North Korea recently. In the past three years, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un has purged most of the men who worked closely with his father, Kim Jong-il, and many have been executed. Whole families have been murdered, including some with links by blood or marriage to Kim’s own.

So we cannot just assume North Korea’s nukes are purely defensive, or that Kim Jong-un, after 28 years of living in a gilded cage and threeand-a-half years of absolute power, has been adequately instructed in nuclear deterrence that have become orthodox in older nuclear weapon states. Nor is anybody in his military hierarchy going to try to instruct him now.

The mystery has deepened with the abrupt cancellation of UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon’s scheduled visit to North Korea. We’ll have to wait to find out why what’s, but military forces all over north-eastern Asia are undoubtedly on high alert.

Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries