The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency said Thursday that U.S. intelligence agencies believe North Korea has mastered the technology for arming its missiles with nuclear warheads, an assessment that, if correct, means the North could build weapons to threaten Japan and perhaps the Western United States.
While Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, the Defense Intelligence Agency chief, said in Senate testimony that North Korea was judged to have the “capability” to put a nuclear weapon atop its missiles, he stopped well short of saying it had done so, or even that it had assembled warheads small enough for the purpose. Nor did he give any evidence to back up his view during the public session of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Still, his assessment of North Korea’s progress exceeded what officials have publicly declared.
When asked by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) during a hearing Thursday whether “North Korea has the ability to arm a missile with a nuclear device,” Jacoby responded, “The assessment is that they have the capability to do that, yes ma’am.”
At a White House news conference Thursday, President Bush said that given the uncertainties, he was worried about the progress North Korea had made on its nuclear program under its leader, Kim Jong Il. “There is concern about his capacity to deliver,” Bush said.
In 2003, the U.S. warned South Korea and Japan that satellite imagery had identified an advanced nuclear testing site in a remote corner of North Korea where equipment had been set up to test conventional explosives that could compress a plutonium core and set off a compact nuclear explosion.
Since then, U.S. investigators have been pressing Pakistan for details about the kind of technology North Korean engineers might have been given, perhaps in conjunction with visits they made to Pakistani nuclear sites.
Building a nuclear warhead that can be delivered by a missile requires the technical sophistication to make it small and light. Moreover, being sure that warheads would work probably would require a test explosion, which North Korea never has conducted.
In an interview Thursday afternoon, Clinton called Jacoby’s statement “the first confirmation, publicly, by the administration that the North Koreans have the ability to arm a missile with a nuclear device that can reach the United States. Put simply, they couldn’t do that when George Bush became president, and now they can.”
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At his news conference, Bush defended his decision to pursue six-country diplomatic talks in an effort to stop North Korea’s nuclear program and said the U.S. was exploring various options, including taking the issue to the UN Security Council.