North Korea and Intelligence U.S. Officials Keep Underestimating the Nuclear Threat. See note please
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JOHN KERRY TO NORTH KOREA…’I’M WARNING YOU NOW…YOU ARE GOING TO GET THE MOTHER OF ALL WARNINGS…..” RSK
Secretary of State John Kerry visited Beijing on the weekend, with no discernible progress in persuading China to drop its support for its North Korean clients. That’s a familiar China bites U.S. story. The more important—and disquieting—news is the dispute over the North Korean threat among U.S. intelligence agencies.
The dispute broke into public view on Thursday when Congressman Doug Lamborn (R., Colo.) read an unclassified sentence from a new assessment by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. The DIA has concluded with “moderate confidence” that North Korea may have a nuclear warhead small enough to be placed on a ballistic missile. This judgment arrives two months after North Korea tested a nuclear device—its third—and when another test missile launch is expected any day.
That news produced a scramble inside the Obama Administration, with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issuing a statement telling everyone not to worry. Mr. Clapper quoted a separate Pentagon statement that “it would be inaccurate to suggest that the North Korean regime has fully developed and tested the kinds of nuclear weapons referenced in the passage.” And in any case, Mr. Clapper added, “the statement read by the Member is not an Intelligence Community assessment” (his emphasis).
Neither of these not-to-worry statements is reassuring, especially given the U.S. intelligence track record on North Korea. Even if Pyongyang hasn’t so far “fully developed” a missile that can nuke Los Angeles, the point is that it is making major progress. It’s also important to understand that an “intelligence community assessment” is a lowest-common denominator bureaucratic consensus that is often wrong.
U.S. illusions about North Korea’s nuclear threat go back two decades to the Clinton Administration’s claim that it had stopped North Korea’s plutonium-weapons program. The 1994 Agreed Framework supposedly froze the North’s nuclear programs in exchange for food and energy aid.
The North kept making plutonium even as it was also developing a secret uranium-enrichment program, which it finally admitted to State Department official James Kelly in October 2002. The North later denied it had ever made such an admission, and the U.S. foreign policy elite proceeded to blame John Bolton and other Bush officials for supposedly lying about the uranium-enrichment intelligence.
European Pressphoto Agency
Yongbyon complex nuclear facility, some 100 km north of Pyongyang, North Korea.
Kim Jong Il, father of current dictator Kim Jong Eun, tested the North’s first nuclear device in 2006. Prodded by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her emissary Chris Hill, President Bush proceeded to cut his own nuclear deal with the North, this time writing uranium enrichment out of the script. In 2007, an intelligence official told the Senate that the U.S. no longer had “high confidence” that such a facility existed.
It would have to wait until 2010 for Mr. Bolton to be proved right. That November, Siegfried Hecker, a former director at Los Alamos, was given a tour by North Korea of a state-of-the-art enrichment facility, which he described as “stunning.”
Mr. Hecker suspects that the North also has a second covert facility to produce highly enriched, bomb-grade uranium, which may have been the fissile material used in its latest nuclear test in February. Mr. Hecker notes that tests are essential for the North to master the miniaturization technology it needs to put a warhead on a missile.
As for those missiles, the North has also been making notable strides. In December it successfully placed a satellite in orbit using a three-stage missile. The smaller Musudan missile that it may soon launch is modeled on a Soviet submarine-launched missile and may be able to reach as far away as Guam, where the U.S. has a military base.
Even normally cautious analysts are alarmed. “We have assessed for some time that North Korea likely has the capability to mount a plutonium-based nuclear warhead on the shorter range Nodong missile, which has a range of about 800 miles,” writes David Albright of the centrist Institute for Science and International Security.
Estimating the North’s capabilities is always going to be tricky given the country’s totalitarian secrecy. A degree of uncertainty is inherent in any intelligence assessment, but that uncertainty applies as much to understating the threat as to overstating it.
In 1962 the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community was that Russia wouldn’t dare field missiles in Cuba. In 1990 U.S. intelligence grossly underestimated Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs, before overstating them in 2003. A notorious national intelligence estimate in 2007 claimed that Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons work.
For two decades U.S. officials have pretended that Pyongyang will give up its weapons and that its technological progress is too slow to pose a real threat. Now we’re learning the opposite is closer to the truth. A wiser policy begins by recognizing that no negotiation is going to end what will sooner or later become the North’s ability to kill millions of Americans. The only way to end the threat is a new policy aimed at ending the regime.
A version of this article appeared April 15, 2013, on page A16 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: North Korea and Intelligence.
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