North Korea Claims It Has Built Small Nuclear Warheads
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Version 0 of 1. SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said on Wednesday that it had already built nuclear weapons small enough to be carried by missiles, even as a senior American general questioned the country’s recent claim that it had successfully tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile. “It is long since the D.P.R.K.’s nuclear striking means have entered the stage of producing smaller nukes and diversifying them,” the National Defense Commission said in a statement, using the initials of North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The statement was carried by the official news agency, K.C.N.A. “The D.P.R.K. has reached the stage of ensuring the highest precision and intelligence and best accuracy of not only medium- and short-range rockets, but long-range ones,” the agency said. Officials and analysts in Washington and Seoul remain uncertain and even divided over how close North Korea has come to acquiring a nuclear weapon small enough to be put on a missile, or its ability to deliver a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile. But their concern has grown since the North placed a satellite into orbit in December 2012, successfully demonstrating a rocket technology needed for a long-range missile. In February 2013, North Korea also claimed that it had conducted its third underground nuclear test with “a smaller and lighter A-bomb.” A month later, the North’s main government newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun, quoted a North Korean general as saying that the North’s “intercontinental ballistic missiles and other missiles are on a standby, loaded with lighter, smaller and diversified nuclear warheads.” Adm. William E. Gortney, the commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, told reporters last month that American intelligence officials believed that North Korea had the ability to put a nuclear weapon on its KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missile “and shoot it at the homeland,” although he said the North had yet to run a flight test of the missile. North Korea’s statement on Wednesday came in response to international criticism of a ballistic missile test Pyongyang said it conducted on May 8. United Nations resolutions prohibit North Korea from testing such a missile. North Korea said the May 8 test involved successfully launching a strategic missile from a submarine. But some analysts have since questioned the claim, saying that some of the photographs of the episode that North Korea released may have been altered and that the test launch may have been conducted from a submerged barge, rather than a submarine. Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Tuesday, Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr., vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, voiced similar misgivings. “They have not gotten as far as their clever video editors and spinmeisters would have us believe,” Admiral Winnefeld said. “They are many years away from developing this capability. But if they are eventually able to do so, it will present a hard-to-detect danger for Japan and South Korea, as well as our service members stationed in the region.” The South Korean Defense Ministry, however, says that the North successfully tested the “ejection” of a submarine-launched missile on May 9, although it did not involve a full flight test. |