North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that ...

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North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say
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Report: North Korea successfully produced a nuclear warhead

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Report: North Korea successfully produced a nuclear warhead (The Washington Post)

By Joby Warrick, Ellen Nakashima and Anna Fifield August 8, 2017
North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.

The analysis, completed last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency, comes on the heels of another intelligence assessment that sharply raises the official estimate for the total number of bombs in the communist country’s atomic arsenal. The United States calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some independent experts think the number is much smaller.

The findings are likely to deepen concerns about an evolving North Korean military threat that appears to be advancing far more rapidly than many experts had predicted. U.S. officials concluded last month that Pyongyang is also outpacing expectations in its effort to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the American mainland.

President Trump, speaking Tuesday at an event at his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., said North Korea will face a devastating response if its threats continue. “They will be met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,” he said.

Earlier Tuesday, North Korea described a new round of U.N. sanctions as an attempt “to strangle a nation” and warned that in response, “physical action will be taken mercilessly with the mobilization of all its national strength.”


[North Korea says it won’t give up nuclear weapons]

Although more than a decade has passed since North Korea’s first nuclear detonation, many analysts thought it would be years before the country’s weapons scientists could design a compact warhead that could be delivered by missile to distant targets. But the new assessment, a summary document dated July 28, concludes that this critical milestone has been reached.

“The IC [intelligence community] assesses North Korea has produced nuclear weapons for ballistic missile delivery, to include delivery by ICBM-class missiles,” the assessment states, in an excerpt read to The Washington Post. Two U.S. officials familiar with the assessment verified its broad conclusions. It is not known whether the reclusive regime has successfully tested the smaller design, although North Korea officially claimed last year that it had done so.

The DIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

An assessment this week by the Japanese Ministry of Defense also concludes that there is evidence to suggest that North Korea has achieved miniaturization.

Kim is becoming increasingly confident in the reliability of his nuclear arsenal, analysts have concluded, explaining perhaps the dictator’s willingness to engage in defiant behavior, including missile tests that have drawn criticism even from North Korea’s closest ally, China. On Saturday, China and Russia joined other members of the U.N. Security Council in approving punishing new economic sanctions, including a ban on exports that supply up to a third of North Korea’s annual $3 billion in earnings.

[What the new U.N. sanctions on North Korea mean]

TIMELINE: Trump’s North Korea policy VIEW GRAPHIC
The nuclear progress further raises the stakes for Trump, who has vowed that North Korea will never be allowed to threaten the United States with nuclear weapons. In an interview broadcast Saturday on MSNBC’s “Hugh Hewitt Show,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster said the prospect of a North Korea armed with ­nuclear-tipped ICBMs would be “intolerable, from the president’s perspective.”

“We have to provide all options . . . and that includes a military option,” he said. But McMaster said the administration would do everything short of war to “pressure Kim Jong Un and those around him, such that they conclude it is in their interest, to denuclearize.” The options said to be under discussion range from new multilateral negotiations to reintroducing U.S. battlefield nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula, officials familiar with internal discussions said.

At the same time, the administration has been attempting to push North Korea toward talks, but Pyongyang has shown no interest in dialogue.

[North Korea could cross ICBM threshold next year, U.S. officials warn]

Determining the precise makeup of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal has long been a difficult challenge for intelligence officials because of the regime’s culture of extreme secrecy and insularity. The country’s weapons scientists have conducted five nuclear tests since 2006, the latest being a 20- to 30-kiloton detonation on Sept. 9, 2016, that produced a blast estimated to be up to twice that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

But producing a compact nuclear warhead that can fit inside a missile is a technically demanding feat, one that many analysts thought was still beyond North Korea’s grasp. Last year, state-run media in Pyongyang displayed a spherical device that government spokesmen described as a miniaturized nuclear warhead, but whether it was a real bomb remained unclear. North Korean officials described the September detonation as a successful test of a small warhead designed to fit on a missile, although many experts were skeptical of the claim.

Kim has repeatedly proclaimed his intention to field a fleet of nuclear-tipped ICBMs as a guarantor of his regime’s survival. His regime took a major step toward that goal last month with the first successful tests of a missile with intercontinental range. Video analysis of the latest test led some analysts to conclude that the missile caught fire and disintegrated as it plunged back toward Earth’s surface, suggesting that North Korea’s engineers might not be capable yet of building a reentry vehicle that can carry the warhead safely through the upper atmosphere. But U.S. analysts and many independent experts think this hurdle will be overcome by late next year.

“What initially looked like a slow-motion Cuban missile crisis is now looking more like the Manhattan Project, just barreling along,” said Robert Litwak, a nonproliferation expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of “Preventing North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout,” published by the center this year. “There’s a sense of urgency behind the program that is new to the Kim Jong Un era.”

Although few discount North Korea’s progress, some prominent U.S. experts warned against the danger of overestimating the threat. Siegfried Hecker, director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the last known U.S. official to inspect North Korea’s nuclear facilities, has calculated the size of North Korea’s arsenal at no more than 20 to 25 bombs. He warned of potential risks that can come from making Kim into a bigger menace than he actually is.

[Some experts see Russian echoes in North Korea’s missile advances]

“Overselling is particularly dangerous,” said Hecker, who visited North Korea seven times between 2004 and 2010, and met with key leaders of the country’s weapons programs. “Some like to depict Kim as being crazy — a madman — and that makes the public believe that the guy is undeterrable. He’s not crazy and he’s not suicidal. And he’s not even unpredictable.”

“The real threat,” Hecker said, “is we’re going to stumble into a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula.”

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In the past, U.S. intelligence agencies have occasionally overestimated the North Korean threat. In the early 2000s, the George W. Bush administration assessed that Pyongyang was close to developing an ICBM that could strike the U.S. mainland — a prediction that missed the mark by more than a decade. More recently, however, analysts and policymakers have been surprised repeatedly as North Korea achieved key milestones months or years ahead of schedule, said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies. There was similar skepticism about China’s capabilities in the early 1960s, said Lewis, who has studied that country’s pathway to a successful nuclear test in 1964.

“There is no reason to think that the North Koreans aren’t making the same progress after so many successful nuclear explosions,” Lewis said. “The big question is: Why do we hold the North Koreans to a different standard than we held [Joseph] Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China? North Korea is testing underground, so we’re always going to lack a lot of details. But it seems to me a lot of people are insisting on impossible levels of proof because they simply don’t want to accept what should be pretty obvious.”

Yuki Oda in Tokyo contributed to this report.

Read more:

North Korea is fast approaching Trump’s red line

Twenty-five million reasons the U.S. hasn’t struck North Korea

Kim Jong Un’s rockets are getting an important boost — from China

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Joby Warrick joined the Post’s national staff in 1996. He has covered national security, the environment and the Middle East and currently writes about terrorism. He is the author of two books, including 2015’s “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS," which was awarded a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Follow @jobywarrick
Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She covers cybersecurity, surveillance, counterterrorism and intelligence issues. Follow @nakashimae
Anna Fifield is The Post’s bureau chief in Tokyo, focusing on Japan and the Koreas. She previously reported for the Financial Times from Washington D.C., Seoul, Sydney, London and from across the Middle East. Follow @Annafifield
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Conscience of a Conservative
8/9/2017 12:08 AM GMT+0200
What is getting lost in the story is that Obama set a dangerous precedent by negotiating permission to Iran to get Nuclear weapons, albeit with a delay. Furthermore North Korea threatened the U.S. with its Nuclear arsenal. That said, Trump's threat need not have been done via social media and could more effectively have been delivered privately and through backdoor channels. It also doesn't seem that China's been told North korea is there vassal state and they must deal with it.

While Trump may not be getting a total fair shake in the press. His inexperience and lack of composure is clearly showing. He reacted to the North Korea threat from his golf course after spending the last two days on twitter attacking the media and his political rivals instead of attending to the affairs of the country.

LikeShare31
Bluefish2012---et_ux
8/8/2017 118 PM GMT+0200
A retired South Korean General said, “but I’ve always believed that, with good common sense and engagement, cooler heads will prevail.”

Assumes facts not in evidence.
LikeShare19
finder72
8/8/2017 117 PM GMT+0200
You have to agree with Winston Smith Jr. All this reported nonsense only stokes the fears of Americans. Fear and war, the tools to keep Americans in their misery. They so preoccupied with Trump's tweets and the meaningless news like this article that they can't even see the depth of their own misery.

The Chinese must be celebrating. With Trump, they likely see two countries that would rather live without. With America engaged in yet another war, China would rise in world leadership, and be better off economically. Just like Vietnam, China would supply North Korea to keep the U.S. in a non-winnable war.

Trump has a no win situation with North Korea. Americans have a no win situation with Trump.
LikeShare50
bourdoy
8/8/2017 8:07 PM GMT+0200
We should allow North Korea to decide which non-military outcome they would rather pursue: denuclearization or democratization.

If they agree to pursue democratization, and transitition from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy and place an elected civilian in charge of their military, then we potentially have a new nuclear armed ally on the border with China.

Presenting them with an additional non-military alternative to denuclearization, even if we do not expect them to take it, will weaken the consensus of their establishment and make pursuing denuclearization easier. If we do not present them with any other non-military alternative to denuclearization, and only deliver them a single ultimatum backed by force, then we actually strengthen the consensus and resolve within their establishment and weaken our own position.
LikeShare25
lrhalpern
8/8/2017 76 PM GMT+0200
There are no "good" options, but there are options. We can sit around and wait will this loose canon in North Korea shoots his threatening mouth off; OR we can try to organize a tighter world wide series of sanctions with nothing going in or out of North Korea, via a blockade of necessary; OR give KJU a free shot and get him on retaliation; OR realize that this guy in NK is Bat Crap Crazy and will only understand a mushroom cloud of Pyongyang. Pick your poison.
LikeShare46
Native Earthling
8/8/2017 7:14 PM GMT+0200
The chances of North Korea ever attacking the United States are exactly zero.

Their entire military capability is a reaction to 60 years of U.S. threats that they have every right to take quite seriously.

But they are not suicidal. Any North Korean use of their quite minimal nuclear capacity would result in their annihilation - which they know.

The only threat North Korea poses is to an invading force. And that's easily resolved. Don't invade them.
LikeShare131
jms175
8/8/2017 7:00 PM GMT+0200
I would recommend everyone read Mark Bowden's piece in this month's Atlantic. Unfortunately, there are no good options. Even a clean decapitation strike with no nuclear missile launches creates a massive refugee problem. A full, peaceful unification of of the countries would cost several times what the German unification cost. And, bottom lie, the Chinese do not want a pro-US regime on their doorstep.
LikeShare89
jpm224
8/8/2017 6:42 PM GMT+0200 [Edited]
It seems every couple weeks, North Korea passes a threshold which we are told it wouldn't reach for another year or two.

At this rate, tough decisions will need to be made in a matter of weeks, not months. It seems obvious at this point that KJU will not be deterred by sanctions, and will accept nothing less than NK being recognized as a nuclear power. Continued inaction by the international community will result in this becoming the status quo.
LikeShare54
rdrdr99
8/8/2017 62 PM GMT+0200
North Korea wants a seat at the table. If there are to be negotiations, then that may have to be what the world gives Kim Jong Un. If we had wanted truly to deter NK's efforts, we should have bombed them long ago, which we did not do for lots of good reasons. But this point in time was inevitable. Even Kim must understand that if he ever were to strike any country with nuclear weapons, then the nuclear apocalypse that we all fear would transpire and North Korea would be uninhabitable for generations to come. He would not be the first seemingly irrational world leader with a seat at the table, but if that will cause him to cease developing and testing nuclear weapons and delivery systems, it will be worth it.
LikeShare24
SystemAdmin517
8/8/2017 6:21 PM GMT+0200
Kim's nuclear arsenal exists for more than protecting the regime's survival -- it exists to extract concessions (economic, political, military) from every other country except China and Russia. The threats, intimidation and nuclear blackmail will not stop if and when the US (and South Korea and Japan) agree to not seek regime change; in fact, Kim will be emboldened.

Options are few and all are bad.
LikeShare47
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But analysts suggest that the Hwasong-15 may have been outfitted with a lighter, “dummy” warhead that would have extended its flight capabilities. Whether North Korea could equip an ICBM with a nuclear payload is still unclear, but a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report claimed North Korean scientists had successfully miniaturized a nuclear warhead, the Washington Post reported in August.

This launch was just “another minor step forward” in North Korea’s weapons development, said Michael Elleman, a ballistic missile analyst for 38 North, a North Korea analysis group based at Johns Hopkins University’s U.S.-Korea Institute. Ellemen also questioned the atmosphere reentry capabilities and reliability of North Korean missile technology.

“A viable ICBM capable of reaching the west coast of the U.S. mainland is still a year away, though North Korea continues to progress,” he said in a statement provided to TIME.

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US intelligence: North Korea can now fit nuclear warheads on missiles and may have 60 bombs
A confidential US intelligence report reviewed by The Washington Post concluded that North Korea had made a breakthrough and could now build nuclear bombs small enough to fit on missiles.

The intelligence community "assesses North Korea has produced nuclear weapons for ballistic missile delivery, to include delivery by ICBM-class missiles," a portion of the assessment reads, according to The Post.US intel: North Korea can fit miniaturized nuclear warheads on missiles - Business Insider

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Hai scritto a settembre,non sapevi che 8 agosto il tuo occidente,non il mio,aveva gia concluso che "minia" pronto per ICBM e missili?Cmq se ho capito bene gli articoli nella lingua inglese.Se tutto quindi corretto:ma allora non importa a nessuno in questo forum della Corea del Nord , e di Terza Guerra Mondiale o guerre in "peninsula".Qualcosa mi dice che VOI massoni ed ebrei volete tenere nascosti al popolo cose a dir poco GRAVI.Comunita ebraica non vuole informarci a NOI POPOLO IGNORANTE e forse bestiale.Ma.....

[dDuck]

Hai scritto a settembre,non sapevi che 8 agosto il tuo occidente,non il mio,aveva gia concluso che "minia" pronto per ICBM e missili?Cmq se ho capito bene gli articoli nella lingua inglese.Se tutto quindi corretto:ma allora non importa a nessuno in questo forum della Corea del Nord , e di Terza Guerra Mondiale o guerre in "peninsula".Qualcosa mi dice che VOI massoni ed ebrei volete tenere nascosti al popolo cose a dir poco GRAVI.Comunita ebraica non vuole informarci a NOI POPOLO IGNORANTE e forse bestiale.Ma.....

Figuriamoci se non tiravi fuori i massoni e gli ebrei.

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Figuriamoci se non tiravi fuori i massoni e gli ebrei.

Si è ripetitivo e noioso però quanti allora stanno troppo zitti "per paura di essere trattati come cattivi".I poteri forti cerano:dai faraoni,a Mussolini,e ora in USA i parenti di Gesu, quelle che cè cè!Che poi ci sia un aiuto della gente a far si che quesat comunita di ebrei e massoni abbia incisività, non lo so.Cmq la pressione di essere Il Satana per il mondo se si ha come nemico la massoneria e gli ebrei,non tuttiì chiaro fra essi sono enemies...,ci sono Paul Howe meglio di blobb..e non è sufficiente..ma tanti saranno persone decenti... non importa...ma chi gestisce il potere forte in USA scusi,se lo fanno male mi da fastidio!!!Manca il rientro entro un anno e NOKO non doveva metterci 15 anni per toccare gli USA?Siete strani su sto forum o!