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Sent: Monday, November 10, 2003 9:51 PM
Subject: N. Korea fully nuclear, CIA says 


N. Korea fully nuclear, CIA says 
No doubts now it can detonate arms, Congress told 

David E. Sanger, New York Times  Sunday, November 9, 2003  







Washington -- The CIA has told Congress that it now believes that North Korea has mastered the technology of turning its nuclear fuel into functioning weapons without having to prove their effectiveness through nuclear tests. 

The CIA report goes beyond previous public CIA statements that North Korea built one or two weapons in the early 1990s -- a figure many intelligence experts believe has risen in the past few months. 

Those statements carried the presumption that North Korea had developed the technology to detonate weapons, but in background briefings, some American and Asian intelligence officials expressed doubts. They said that in the absence of a North Korean nuclear test, there was no way to be certain of what it could do. 

Now those doubts appear to be gone. 

The CIA's notification to Congress, sent in mid-August, reports that while North Korea could conduct a nuclear test at any time, it is probably seeking to avoid "precipitating an international backlash and further isolation." 

For the first time, the agency has publicly stated that the North's technology has progressed far enough to make a highly visible test -- such as those in China in the mid-1960s and in India and Pakistan in the 1990s -- unnecessary. 

The agency's new assessment came in a series of written, unclassified responses to questions posed by members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. 

The conclusion, if accurate, would give credence to recent statements by North Korean officials that they already possessed a working "nuclear deterrent," and to their assertion that it was too late for the Bush administration to stop it from becoming a full-fledged nuclear power. 

The CIA's judgment complicates the diplomatic task facing President Bush as the United States moves toward another round of six-nation talks with the North, probably next month. Bush, who declared this year that he would never "tolerate" a nuclear North Korea, has said that the United States is prepared to offer -- in coordination with other nations -- some form of security guarantees to the North in return for its agreement to disarm. 

But even if the North agrees, defining "disarmament" may be extremely difficult. U.S. intelligence officials admit that they do not know exactly how much weapons-grade fuel North Korea has produced this year, since international inspectors were expelled last December. 

One senior official said Saturday that the significance of the CIA's conclusion is that "we may never know for sure how many weapons they manufactured and then hid away in some tunnel." 

Even if North Korea agrees to give up both its production facilities and the weapons it has already produced, a step many Korea experts in the administration believe is unlikely, "How would we ever know that we've gotten all of it?" the official asked. 

The statement in the CIA came in reply to questions posed by senators in the spring. The answers were submitted on Aug. 18, but not made public until recently. They are written in the arcane language of nuclear intelligence. 

"We assess that North Korea has produced one or two simple fission-type nuclear weapons and has validated the designs without conducting yield- producing nuclear tests," the report to the committee said. The agency appeared to be referring to the kind of basic bomb containing plutonium extracted from North Korea's nuclear power reactors, not to warheads made from highly enriched uranium. 

The agency noted news reports that the North had conducted "high- explosive tests since the 1980s in order to validate its nuclear weapons design(s)." 

Those tests, it suggested, made it unnecessary to stage a full nuclear explosion to be confident that the designs would work. 

The full document, as well as another assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency, were posted on the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists (www.fas.org), an independent group that analyzes arms control and other issues. The agency's report also concludes that Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, appears to have a "secure" hold on power. 

It concludes that the chances for the reunification of the Korean peninsula, divided since the Korean War ended a half century ago, are "low" in the next five years, and that if the North Korean leader were displaced, he would probably be replaced by a military official. 

The conclusions give little cause for optimism among those in the Bush administration who hope -- as the Clinton administration did -- that the government will collapse because of North Korea's deep economic troubles. 

On July 1, a month and a half before the report to the Senate, the New York Times reported that American satellites had been studying an advanced nuclear testing site in an area called Youngdoktong, and that the CIA had told allies it believed that the North was working on designs there that would produce a compact nuclear warhead that could fit onto a missile. 

Since then, a number of officials have said they believe that there is a weapons laboratory adjacent to that facility; it may be there that much of the work the CIA described has been conducted. 

The unclassified version of the statements sent to the Senate make no reference to the size of the nuclear weapons that the North can now produce, or whether they can be fitted onto the country's missiles, including those that can reach Japan and beyond. Nor does it disclose which nations may have helped the North. 

Decades ago, the country received early aid on its nuclear program from China, which is now working with the Bush administration to prevent North Korea from going nuclear. 

Several years ago, it reached a deal with Pakistan that swapped North Korean missile technology for Pakistani nuclear aid; many experts believe it was the Pakistani connection that allowed North Korea to make the final leap. 

Pakistan's aid was chiefly related to a second secret nuclear project in North Korea, involving the production of highly enriched uranium, which intelligence agencies concluded probably had not yet produced a weapon. It was the discovery of that project that touched off the latest nuclear crisis with North Korea, beginning a year ago. 

It is unclear whether Pakistan or other nations have given recent help to the older North Korean project, which involves producing weapons from the plutonium extracted from spent nuclear fuel. 

The documents submitted to the Senate also suggest how difficult it is to gather reliable intelligence about North Korea. 

In the section about Kim's hold on power, the Defense Intelligence Agency says, "We lack reliable insights into the internal dynamics of his regime and note there are no obvious successors if he should be deposed." 
 

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