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North Korea Now Miniaturizing Warheads for Their ICBMs
Well, this isn’t good.
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 new 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 U.S. calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some independent experts believe the number of bombs 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 last month concluded that Pyongyang is also outpacing expectations in its effort to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking cities on the American mainland.
The UN Security Council unanimously passed a new sanctions regime against North Korea which is expected to cut its export revenue by a third. This led Pyongyang, or course, to issue more threats:
“Packs of wolves are coming in attack to strangle a nation,” the North Korean statement said. “They should be mindful that the D.P.R.K.’s strategic steps accompanied by physical action will be taken mercilessly with the mobilization of all its national strength.”
Given Seoul’s 10 million residents are located just 35 miles from the demilitarized zone, all allied military options would be very bloody indeed. How do you recommend the US and its allies respond?
Published in Foreign Policy, Military
This is the crucial step that makes them a real threat. We’re likely closer to actual nuclear war than we’ve ever actually been. As for the response, it may be too late for any response that doesn’t cost a lot of lives.
A series of highly coordinated, simultaneous strikes using cluster munitions on as many of the artillery positions on the north side of the DMZ in combination with cruise missile strikes to destroy as much NorK command and control structure as possible would minimize casualties in S. Korea.
The Trump Administration should immediately announce that they are reviving the bunker-busting nuclear weapon development program on a fast-track in order to threaten the NorKs’ 8 underground nuclear sites with destruction.
So at what point to we pre-emptively decapitate this psychotic regime? Or have we missed that point?
Tell the Chinese that every dime we spend on the war, and pre-war build up, will be subtracted from the money we owe them.
The security procedures that surround Kim Jong-un’s whereabouts are notoriously byzantine and supposedly include body doubles. It’s hard to say whether merely decapitating them would be enough or whether that would simply set in motion the much-feared artillery barrage on Seoul.
Written before the release of the OP report:
It’s unfortunate but most of America has no clue of the severe danger a miniaturized NoKo nuke means,and their knee-jerk response will likely be “let’s negotiate”, with any dissenting voices being drowned out by an ever arrogant, disingenuous and threatening media.
Clearly the time for negotiation has passed for a miniaturized nuke means we are on the brink any minute now of a nuclear war, particularly given the mental state of Kim Jong Un. We will never be able to tell with any great deal of accurately exactly what their nuclear capability is from this point on, but it appears that the Norks now can threaten South Korea, Japan and Taiwan at will, with America also in that mix. This is unbelievably serious.
I wasn’t really thinking about limiting it to him. I doubt taking Kim Jong-un out alone would help much. I was thinking more in terms of taking out Phongyang along with anywhere else from which command and control could plausibly be exercised.
I live in Tokyo (Boston-born/-raised and managed to avoid being pulled over to the Dark Blue Side).
I’m also a Jew who has close ties with Israel.
(Just to toss one more in there, in the “Some of my best friends are” category, one of my closest friends since undergrad 25-plus years ago is the son of Korean immigrants — my friend’s father, as an adolescent pretty much literally climbing out of the rubble that had been his home in the Cholla region, appealed for help from a passing GI [circa 1953] and parlayed that chance relationship eventually into sponsorship to move to the US.)
I don’t in the slightest bit downplay how much peril Seoul’s denizens face — the slaughter of these valiant, hardy, dynamic people could indeed run into the millions in any number of conflict scenarios.
Similarly, I don’t in the slightest bit dismiss the magnitude of the agonies that await possibly millions of pitiable enslaved North Koreans in the line of fire in the event the US unleashes a strike against the Kim regime.
But that same regime poses an incalculable threat to the US — and even if it were “calculable” it would still be just as intolerable.
Moreover, this is a regime that is working hand-in-glove with the apocalyptic regime of genocidal fanatics headquartered in Tehran.
We (the US, Japan, the ROK, and Israel) will get no help defusing the situation from either Beijing or Moscow — quite the contrary.
This goes even beyond the parameters Churchill laid out in condemning Neville Chamberlain in 1940 (“You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will get war.”).
While I’m not right up at the DMZ, I’m in the neighborhood, and I don’t doubt that a US strike might put my own neighborhood at some risk — but strike we must.
Yea, I don’t know that negotiation won’t be part of the solution (assuming there is one, not a safe assumption), but it needs to be backed by credible threats. You can’t approach a murderous butcher with a messiah complex from a position of weakness and expect to accomplish anything. He, and the coterie around him holding the reins of power, need to know that their own lives are at imminent risk.
2.5 Million people live in Pyongyang.
I have no doubt that we possess the firepower to vaporize that city and every single one of its inhabitants. I weep at the thought that we must contemplate it.
In your analogy though, I think Munich has been playing out for the last 20+ years and our Chamberlains are named Clinton, Bush and Obama. It is always tempting to kick the can down the road and it sometimes even proves wise in hindsight to do so. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t as well which is why we all remember Munich as such a paradigm.
The irony is that we now have a President who promised to be different from all of those in substantive ways and although he uses incredibly bellicose language, we have no idea whatsoever what he’ll actually do about this.
More than 10 million people live in Los Angeles, and most of them are Americans. I weep that we must contemplate it too, but contemplate it we must. We have given this vile regime the time it needed to arm itself with our lack of resolve. It may be too late to do anything but live with it and pray there’s no catastrophic misstep. Or it may not. I don’t know enough to know. But I think the time for “taking options off the table” should be over and we should be considering whatever is necessary to keep those millions of Americans safe from a holocaust on our shores.
This is why I didn’t want Trump to be president. It is exactly this test I feared he would fail. I still pray I’ve underestimated the man. But this is the test I feared.
What do you mean? He got the UN to condemn NK, and now China, straddling the fence for so long, has pointedly and unequivocally told its li’l bro not to flaunt the UN sanctions. China, after all, can turn off NK’s electricity. No, I’d say Trump is doing as well as any prez could with the awful situation B. Hussein’s “strategic patience” left us.
Do you guys think Trump would make a first strike on North Korea, even if it was totally justified?
He seems to be going out of his way not to have another war, and resuming the Korean War would have the potential to get worse than anything we’ve seen since… well… since the Korean War. I don’t even just mean about the civilians around Seoul; fighting the DPRK would be messy business, and there’s a non-zero probability that China could enter the conflict later (again).
I doubt Trump would try pulling that particular band-aid off. Not unless the North Koreans struck first.
That’s the problem. He may be making the political calculation that a preemptive war is not in his political interests which means that all initiative is on the side of the NorKs. They suspect that no matter how severe the provocation, short of actually killing somebody or putting a missile into somebody else’s territory we wouldn’t strike them.
A first-strike may make perfect sense strategically, but politics may stay his hand.
One question is, what is the state of our missile defense after 8 years of Obama, who said he didn’t believe in an ABM system?
Also, isn’t it time to consider encouraging Japan and South Korea to develop their own nuclear weapon programs. At the very least any talk of that would put immense pressure on China to withdraw any support or trade with N.K.
I think the present calculus–overwhelming short-term advantage for SK and the US in avoiding war–will persist right up to the moment an accident or miscommunication or panic prompts NK to start something. I don’t see the North producing a Gorbachev or a Deng Xiaoping anytime in the next 50 years. I think this will end badly because it will be on the North’s initiative. A tragedy.
I’ve heard that the THAAD system we have deployed in that region is actually pretty good. Maybe instead of doing a test run of it against practice drones we should swat their next missile.
Lots of other people don’t like the idea of Japan having nuclear weapons. Like, pretty much everybody in Asia, including the Japanese themselves.
I dunno why we don’t nuke up South Korea though. Unless we’re concerned that the DPRK may acquire the technology if they invade.
Danny Alexander makes an important point regarding North Korea and Iran. If, indeed, the former has miniaturized nukes, so does the latter. Miniaturization opens two avenues of attack: 1) loft one into the ionosphere with little accuracy over the continental US and 2) smuggle one over our porous borders (encasing it in heroin or cocaine empirically produces high odds of non-detection) and place it where it would do the most harm. If multiple bombs are available, this can be done in several cities. In either case, it is the end of life as we know it.
Remember, North Korea, a backward place in general, has somehow – despite its isolation and minimal economy – gathered the significant resources required for these accomplishments. My best guess is that they were financed by Iran, recently given a large financial windfall by our erstwhile president (sic). Cynicism might cause one to paraphrase and posit that Mr. Obama gave Iran the rope with which North Korea will soon hang us.
I’m afraid this can has been kicked as far down the road – by Clinton’s incompetence and Obama’s desire to diminish us – as mere legwork will allow. We have arrived at the point where inaction leaves us at permanent risk of losing one or more cities, or even worse, an EMP attack for which we are woefully unprepared (and intentionally so – since congress [sic] is well aware of this and has chosen to do virtually nothing). It knows, for example, that some models suggest that 90% of our population would not survive the first winter following a successful EMP attack. Even if that figure is exaggerated by a factor of 10, can any president run the risk of such an attack? This storm has been building for years in full display on our leadership’s radar. It is breaking on Trump, but its fundamental causes go back several presidencies.
And neither do the Norks, so the question on the table “is this a feature or a bug?”
So good to see our confidential intelligence assessments in the pages of the Washington Post.
Some people should be in jail.
The responses from the Trump Administration thus far have ranged from “incredibly tepid” to “dropping 50 Cruise Missiles or a MOAB on you.”
https://asia.nikkei.com/Viewpoints/Minxin-Pei/Washington-and-Beijing-on-dangerous-collision-course-over-North-Korea
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/239992/which-is-worse-nuclear-annihilation-or-donald-trump
I’ve noted in the last few months a number of military exercises in Korean airspace that include at least one US bomber that sorties from Japan, escorted by Japanese fighters, and is then picked up by Korean escorts when it enters their airspace. Good training, no doubt, and I’m sure it’s meant to get the attention of the Norks. It’s also getting them used to seeing that mission profile, which could be useful in the future.
As far as incremental actions, I recall that there’s a certain piece of US property still sitting in a Nork harbor. Perhaps it should turn loudly into tiny pieces at o-dark-hundred some night, without any radar or other warnings. That might either focus Kim’s mind, or provoke a rash action at a time of our choosing.
I don’t deny that it’s a choice of damnations and seriously wonder if we have the political will to snuff out a million human beings in one stroke.
I’m glad I don’t have to make that decision, but I’m terrified that Trump is the decider on this one. This is the literal, most hair-raising and awful outcome that we feared last fall. At times it almost makes me wish I were stupid enough to just watch the Kardashians and not worry about real issues.
Not really, though.
Refresh my memory, what was he tepid towards?
The cruise missiles at least showed he was willing to take some advice from somebody on striking an appropriate balance between doing something and starting WWIII (ignoring the larger question of whether there is a compelling US national interest in Syria).