hankyoreh

On Sept. 6

By 2020, North Korea will perfect its nuclear warhead technology and be poised to threaten the continental US, American analysts say. With North Korea carrying out its fifth nuclear test in the face of eight months of international sanctions and pressure, multiple figures are arguing that the North Korean nuclear issue should be regarded not as the object of strategic patience but rather as an imminent threat.

“North Korea’s fifth nuclear test is ominous not only because the country is slowly mastering atomic weaponry, but because it is making headway in developing missiles that could hurl nuclear warheads halfway around the globe, threatening Washington and New York City,” the New York Times said on Sept. 10.

“Military experts say that by 2020, Pyongyang will most likely have the skills to make a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile topped by a nuclear warhead. They also expect that by then North Korea may have accumulated enough nuclear material to build up to 100 warheads,” the paper added.

Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford professor and expert on North Korea’s nuclear program, said that “North Korea’s progress in missile and nuclear development signals that it has gone from seeing unconventional weapons as bargaining chips to ‘deciding they need a nuclear weapons fighting force,’” the New York Times reported.

In April, Adm. Bill Gortney, then-commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), told the US Senate Committee on Armed Services in a hearing that it was unlikely that North Korea had the ability to strike the continental US with a nuclear device delivered by a ballistic missile but that the likelihood of that was gradually increasing.

But now that North Korea has carried out its fifth nuclear test, analysts suggest that its nuclear capability is far greater than current estimates suggest.

In an article that ran in Foreign Policy on Sept. 10, Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, drew attention to the reference to “standardized” nuclear warheads that appeared in the statement released by a North Korean nuclear institute immediately after the nuclear test. “The fact that the warheads are ‘standardized’ is, I think, intended to convey that they are being produced in quantity,” Lewis wrote in the article.

Experts estimate that North Korea currently possesses around 40 kg of weapons-grade plutonium. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) considers 8kg to be the amount of plutonium needed to make a single nuclear warhead. That would suggest that North Korea could make five nuclear warheads with its plutonium stockpile alone.

Lewis offered a slightly different interpretation, however. “It is an unclassified fact that a bomb can be made with as little as 4 kilograms. Divide by four, that’s 10 bombs. North Korea also has an almost totally unknown stockpile of highly enriched uranium,” he wrote.

In March, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called for the development of “stronger” nuclear weapons. What this means is combining plutonium and highly enriched uranium and boosting “the yield of the explosion using a gas of hydrogen isotopes,” Lewis explained. “That means there might be as little as 2 kilograms of plutonium in each device.”

The implication is that North Korea could produce 20 nuclear warheads using its current supply of plutonium. This is the approach that China used when it carried out its 12th nuclear test on Nov. 18, 1971.

North Korea has already vowed to increase its plutonium production, and there is no way to estimate how much highly enriched uranium it possesses. As if the fact that we don’t know the extent of the North’s nuclear capabilities were not bad enough, their development pace is accelerating as well, Lewis said.

As a consequence, more American experts are calling for a move away from the current policy focus on sanctions.

“Tough international sanctions and condemnation has failed to prevent North Korea from conducting nuclear tests and has failed to constrain its ballistic missile program,” said the American Arms Control Association (ACA) in a statement released on Sept. 10. “The next US presidential administration must renew efforts to productively engage North Korea in a diplomatic dialogue with the goal of freezing North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile testing.”

“International sanctions have not been successful against North Korea, just as they have failed in the cases of India, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Pakistan,” said Tariq Rauf, director of the disarmament, arms control and non-proliferation program at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in a statement on Sept. 9.

“The practical way forward must be direct negotiations between North Korea and the USA [. . .] in parallel with a composite strategic dialogue involving China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, the USA and Russia, with the European Union as an observer,” Rauf said.

By Jung In-hwan, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]