Pyongyang's nuclear and missile threats

By Peter Huessy

On Jan. 6, 2016, North Korea again exploded a nuclear device and a month later on Feb. 7 launched a satellite aboard a missile with a range of upwards of 13,000 kilometers.

The conventional response to what some saw as Pyongyang’s reckless behavior was that nothing had significantly changed from previous Korean capabilities. Mirren Gidda in Newsweek that same week, under the headline “What We Know About North Korea’s Hydrogen Bomb,” reflected such assurances by writing “International experts doubt that North Korea has manufactured nuclear weapons small enough to fit on a missile.”

But this commonplace assertion by Newsweek was simply untrue. For almost a decade, the testimony of top American intelligence officials has been the North Korean nuclear missile threat is real. For example, in 2008, the CIA’s top East Asia analyst publicly stated that North Korea had successfully miniaturized nuclear warheads for delivery on its Nodong medium-range missile.

In 2009, European intelligence agencies at NATO headquarters said that North Korea’s Nodong missiles were armed with nuclear warheads. In 2011, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. General Ronald Burgess, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that North Korea has weaponized its nuclear device into warheads for arming ballistic missiles.

Then in early 2015, former top national security officials from the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Clinton warned that the North Korea threat was quite specific, and capable of delivering by satellite a small nuclear warhead to make an EMP attack against the United States.

Shortly thereafter, on April 7, 2015, at a Pentagon press conference, Admiral William Gortney, Commander of North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD), responsible for protecting the U.S. from long-range missiles, warned that the intelligence community assessed that North Korea’s KN-08 mobile ICBM could strike the U.S. with a nuclear warhead.

And on Oct. 8, 2015, Gortney again warned the Atlantic Council: “I agree with the intelligence community that we assess that they (the North Koreans) have the ability, they have the weapons, and they have the ability to miniaturize those weapons, and they have the ability to put them on a rocket that can range the (U.S.) homeland.”

But even when acknowledging North Korea has such missile capabilities as we have outlined above, popular reaction has been to minimize the security threats the missiles represent, claiming it isn’t accurate enough or the attached warhead is too small, or the technology demonstrated is not sufficiently worrisome.

For example, the New York Times echoed this nonchalant view claiming, “Although North Korea can learn much about the technology to build ballistic missiles from satellite launches, putting a satellite into orbit does not guarantee an ability to deliver a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile.”

The New York Times further noted North Korea had never tested a ballistic-missile version of its Unha-series rockets. (And) after four nuclear tests by the North, Western analysts were still unsure whether the country had “mastered the technology to build a warhead small enough to mount on a long-range missile” or “survive the intense heat while re-entering the atmosphere, as well as a guidance system capable of delivering a warhead close to a target.”

Apparently unknown by the New York Times is that a satellite launched warhead in an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) mode exploded some 30-70 kilometers above the United States or Japan or South Korea doesn’t need a guidance system nor is accuracy any great issue. Even if the warhead yield appeared to be small, the apparent small yield of the North Korean warhead could have been what is known as a “boosted fission weapon” which such experts as former Secretary of the Air Force and Reagan’s National Security Adviser Tom Reed believes.

Remember the U.S. and other intelligence services have not detected uranium or plutonium (A-Bomb fuels) in any of the North Korea tests, but have detected tritium (H-Bomb fuel) in at least one. A boosted weapon could explain this anomaly. And could be part of an effort to deploy a super EMP bomb which two Congressional mandated commission reports warned could drive the U.S. economy back to the early 19th century if used to take down our electrical grid.

But the more serious story is that as Tom Reed and others have warned, most recently Doug Feith in the Wall Street Journal of Feb. 26 in “China’s Proliferation Rap Sheet,” the North Korean tests cannot be looked at in isolation. First North Korea cooperates with Iran, Pakistan and China on nuclear and missile technology. Second, China is complicit in this cooperation as well as itself boosting cooperation between Pakistan ― another nuclear armed power ― and North Korea in the years those two militaries were trading nuclear for missile technology.

Third, given that these multiple rogue nuclear powers are working with each other, the sophistication of nuclear threats from any individual state may be greater than is generally believed. And fourth, any one of these states could be working as an agent of the other or of one of their allied terrorist groups which then expands the scope of their capabilities and nuclear threats to the United States and our Republic of Korea and Japan allies.

There are indeed powerful elements in China and elsewhere that seek to eliminate American military power from the Pacific. They see North Korean demonstrated missile and nuclear power as a lever with which to achieve that end.

However, as ICAS symposiums over the past year have increasingly revealed, this strategy is not fully appreciated by American security officials. The only good news, however, is that the strategy may backfire. It appears the Republic of Korea will move to cooperate with the United States in deploying a THAAD missile defense system while also supporting greater sanctions against Pyongyang.

Unfortunately, simultaneously, the bad news is the overall United States missile defense budget may be cut by many hundreds of millions, undercutting efforts to improve and expand our own continental defenses even as we seek to bolster those of our brother and sisters in the Republic of Korea.

Peter Huessy is an ICAS fellow and president of Geo-strategic Analysis. He can be reached at PHuessy@afa.org.