Nuclear Security
North
Korea’s nukes are much scarier than its hacks
BLOOMBERG
DEC 26, 2014
NEW YORK – While the world’s
attention focuses on North Korea’s cyberwar with Sony Pictures, the Hermit
Kingdom is rapidly increasing its stockpile of nuclear weapons material, with
real little pushback from the United States.
A new analysis of
North Korea’s nuclear program by a group of top U.S. experts, led by David
Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security,
estimates that North Korea could have enough material for 79 nuclear weapons by
2020.
The analysis, part of
a larger project called “North Korea’s Nuclear Futures” being run by the
U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International
Studies, has not been previously published.
Albright said the
North Korean government is ramping up its production of plutonium and highly
enriched uranium, speeding toward an amount that would allow it to build enough
nuclear weapons to rival other nuclear states including India, Pakistan and
Israel.
“North Korea is on the
verge of being able to scale up its nuclear weapons program to the level of the
other major players, so it’s critical to head this off,” Albright said in an
interview.
He added, “It is on
the verge of deploying a nuclear arsenal that would pose not only a threat to
the United States and its allies but also to China.”
According to the
analysis, which included the input of a team of former government officials,
nuclear experts and North Korea-watchers, the regime now has as many as four
separate facilities churning out nuclear weapons material or preparing to do
so.
The best-known one, at
Yongbyon, has a functioning 5-megawatt plutonium reactor, a uranium enrichment
grid with thousands of centrifuges and a light-water reactor that could be used
for either military or civilian purposes.
The U.S. intelligence
community also believes the North Koreans have a second centrifuge facility
they have never acknowledged. Even if that second uranium facility is taken out
of the equation, Albright’s team projects that North Korea will have enough
material for 67 bombs in five years time...
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