The military alert level has been raised a notch by South Korea and the US, signifying what’s deemed a “grave threat” posed by the North’s nuclear sabre-rattling.
Its state-controlled news agency, KCNA, said today that “even a minor accidental clash could lead to nuclear war.” I do wish they wouldn’t keep saying this sort of thing.
After our programme last night, I had a chance to discuss matters with two former British ambassadors to Pyongyang – John Everard and Dr J E Hoare – and ask them how alarmed they really were. Both said there was indeed good reason to be fearful, but agreed that North Korea was not yet in a position to actually launch a nuclear missile strike.
I read through the comments on my blog yesterday and checked in with ArmsControlWonk, as recommended by “Gridlock.”
There, I waded through screeds of top wonkage on S-waves and P-waves and kiloton yields and seismic wave magnitudes and the question of miniaturisation; the latter being the apparent crux of the issue. Can North Korea’s nuclear physicists actually make a bomb compact enough to attach it to a missile delivery system?
Still confused on this question though, I called independent British nuclear consultant John Large for his take. And yup: here’s the science:
“Unlike the Iranians, who went with uranium,” he explained, “the North Koreans went the plutonium 239 route. It’s a more reliable, but small, weapon that can’t be much bigger than a beach ball anyway.” (It even looks a bit like one if you check out his A-bomb schematics on this link – and click your way through to slide nine).
The key issue isn’t about how small you can get it,” said Mr Large. “It’s about how to match it up to a missile delivery system.”
On 29 April, the North Korean Foreign Ministry released a statement which said that if the UN didn’t apologise for condemning its ballistic missile launch in April, the DPRK would be compelled to take additional “self-defensive measures”.
“The measures will include,” it warned, “nuclear tests and test-firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
To John Large, that’s pretty interesting, because, he says, the bid to match up the plutonium to a rocket, will, in the absence of decent computer modelling technology up North, require a fair bit of “tweaking” which is done by repeated test-firing. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that the North has test-fired five short-range missiles since Monday.
“I would say were in the acceleration phase,” he went on. “Working on vibration, shock, acceleration… the tests are tweaking the weapons system, having already achieved optimum design for their atom bomb.”
Having worked on its nuclear programme on-and-off for 15 years, you can pretty much bet North Korea’s already got a small arsenal, but there is no IAEA inventory. No one knows how many nukes it’s got, but it’s clearly got enough to stick two fingers up at the rest of the world.
“It’s a very real threat,” says Mr Large. “When you have a weapon and you have a delivery system, you’ve got the complete kit. I would say that if you see a series of smaller rocket tests over the next three months, at the end of that period, they will have it.”
If that’s bad news, worse is that it’s too late to do anything.
Diplomatic carrots and sticks all failed. Sanctions hurt but failed too. You can’t just bomb the Yongbyon plutonium plant because fallout would drift over China and Russia and anyway, the arsenal’s probably stored in diverse locations.
Before this year’s out, the world will probably have to face up to the fact that North Korea will have joined Pakistan, India and Israel as the fourth non-NPT nuclear power.
After that, there’s just the dissuasive power of Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD) – i.e. that for Pyongyang to launch first would be suicide.
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I think the danger lies in the poor health aspect of the NK leader. He’s got little to lose from a first strike. It’s probably something he sadistically wants to see before he pegs it.
History shows that dictators, etc. can be unpredictable and, down right crazy. The notion of a unstable or, opportunistic ruler having a capacity to carry out the ultimate in warfare, but not doing so, is a risky business to aware.
Dialogue and respect may become a powerful tool.
I’m afraid that I fully expect to see a nuclear device used in anger during the course of my remaining lifetime. The more the technology proliferates and gets into the regions of the world where there are stand-offs (India/Pakistan & N. Korea) the greater the risk.
The problem is that I’m not sure that those states are diplomatically skilled/mature enough to be able to back-off from something like the “Cuban Missile crisis”. They seem to be lot more hot-headed than USA/Russia ever were and that’s dangerous.
The solution might just be to try and keep all the diplomatic channels working effectively, with the international community working hard to improve global diplomatic skills/relations rather than all the threats, stand-offs and sanctions that seem to be first-choice at the UN.
Didn’t Japan feel, at least in part, that it was appropriate to bomb Pearl Harbour because of certain sanctions/controls that restricted its access to resources…?
There is the matter of geography here. Even if the North Koreans launched a nuclear strike there targets are restricted and would probably be in South Korea. Not only would China be affected by the nuclear fall out but so would the North Koreans themselves. I would imagine that North Korea would very quickly find themselves annexed by China possibly even the UN.
Also I know that people like to think that one man can start a war, even a nuclear one, but even the most dominating dictator needs supporters, lieutenants and suburbanites to carry out there instructions. It is even less likely that he will be able to lunch a suicide attack if he is terminally ill because they are the ones who have to face the consequences esp. if they intend to be his successors. I will remind you its not just a case of pushing a button to launch a nuclear strike.
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