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North Korea's nuke capability
By David Isenberg
On
September 16, at a news briefing at the Pentagon, US
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said North Korea
already has nuclear weapons and is developing more. "We
know they are a country that has been aggressively
developing nuclear weapons and have nuclear weapons," he
said.
Such a statement is consistent with past
US intelligence assessments that North Korea had
produced one, possibly two, nuclear weapons in the
mid-1990s. But Rumsfeld's unequivocal statement was a
change from just a few days before, when a senior
defense official seemed to say that concerns about
Pyongyang "possessing" nuclear-weapons technology were
related to its capability of making such weapons, rather
than possessing actual weapons.
However,
Rumsfeld's statement is inconsistent with previous
governmental estimates and those of private
organizations, which have always said that North Korea
may have the fissile material with which to make
one or two nuclear weapons.
So just what is the state of North
Korea's nuclear program? That question has been the subject of
much inquiry since US President George W Bush's January 29
State of the Union address when, in outlining the goals of
the war on terrorism, he expanded the US mission
beyond Afghanistan to include not only the termination
of al-Qaeda networks, but also the prevention of
links between these threats and regimes in an "axis of
evil", named as North Korea, Iraq, and Iran, that
seek weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to menace the United
States and its allies.
The "axis of evil" statement
intimated a harder-line policy toward North Korea
at odds with the engagement or "Sunshine Policy" of
US ally South Korea. Also, the speech made clear the
priority placed by the Bush administration on countering
WMD threats as an integral, if not central, component of
the post-September 11, 2001, US security agenda.
According to an article in the summer issue of
Political Science Quarterly, these developments point to
the renewal in coming months of an acerbic debate that
took place at the end of the Bill Clinton administration
over the merits of engaging or containing the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Although the Bush
administration's initial review of North Korea policy in
June 2001 recommended unconditional engagement with
Pyongyang on a broad range of issues, including its
suspected nuclear-weapons program, ballistic-missile
production and export, and its conventional-force
posture on the Korean Peninsula, this position is far
from a conclusive one given the well-known skepticism of
North Korean intentions expressed in the Bush's "axis of
evil" speech as well as other statements by
administration officials.
The standing
non-proliferation agreement between the United States
and the DPRK, the 1994 nuclear Agreed Framework, soon
reaches critical implementation stages that will test
the intentions of both parties and raises debates about
US revision or abandonment of the agreement. And North
Korean leader Kim Jong-il's self-imposed missile-testing
moratorium, which was contingent on continued progress
in US-DPRK dialogue, ends in December (although Kim told
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi last week that
it would be extended).
The North Korean
nuclear-weapons program dates back to the 1980s, when
North Korea began to operate facilities for uranium
fabrication and conversion. In September 1989 the
magazine Jane's Defence Weekly stated that North Korea
"could manufacture nuclear devices in five years' time,
and the means to deliver them soon afterward".
According to the Washington, DC-based group
GlobalSecurity.org, it is estimated that North Korea has
completed the cycle from acquisition of nuclear fuel to
reprocessing it and is on the threshold of a
nuclear-weapons capability. Nevertheless, it is unclear
whether it has actually produced or possesses nuclear
weapons, due to difficulties in developing detonation
devices and delivery vehicles, which require high-tech
and precision technologies. According to various sources
of information, North Korea seems to have extracted
enough plutonium to produce one or two nuclear weapons.
A close examination by the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) of the radioactive isotope content in
nuclear waste from its power plants revealed that North
Korea had extracted about 24 kilograms of plutonium.
North Korea was supposed to have produced 0.9 gram
of plutonium per megawatt every day over a four-year
period from 1987-91. The 0.9g per day multiplied
by 365 days by four years and by 30 megawatts equals
39 kilograms. When the yearly operation ratio is presumed
to be 60 percent, the actual amount was estimated
at 60 percent of 39kg, or some 23.4kg. Since a 20-kiloton
standard nuclear warhead has eight kilograms of
critical mass, this amounts to a mass of material of
nuclear fission out of which about three nuclear
warheads could be extracted. According to the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace in Washington, North
Korea possesses enough plutonium (25-30kg) in spent
nuclear fuel to produce perhaps five or six nuclear
weapons.
Until 1994, the US Department of Energy
(DOE) estimated that eight kilograms of plutonium would
be needed to make a small nuclear weapon. Thus, the
United States' estimate of 12kg could result in one to
two bombs. In January 1994, however, the DOE reduced the
estimate of the amount of plutonium needed to four
kilograms - enough to make up to three bombs if the US
estimate is used and up to six bombs if the other
estimates are used.
On April 22, 1997, US
Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon officially
stated, "When the US-North Korea nuclear agreement was
signed in Geneva in 1994, the US intelligence
authorities already believed North Korea had produced
plutonium enough for at least one nuclear weapon." This
was the first time the United States confirmed North
Korea's possession of plutonium.
On August 7
this year, the Bush administration renewed its
insistence that Pyongyang cooperate immediately with
inspectors of the IAEA to determine how much plutonium
North Korea had produced.
So although there is
no evidence that North Korea possesses a nuclear weapon,
Pyongyang is thought to be capable of building a
first-generation nuclear device, given its current state
of technology.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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