Do not make the mistake of thinking that because my conclusion is the same as another person's that my reasoning is the same
This article notwithstanding, I have no problems treating North Korea as a major problem. It's one thing to act on merely suggestive intelligence when a country is denying they have what your intel suggests, another when the country openly declared your intel is correct.
December 9, 2003
SEOUL — The Bush administration has asserted in recent months that North Korea possesses one or two nuclear bombs and is rapidly developing the means to make more. The statements have raised anxiety about a nuclear arms race in Asia and the possibility that terrorists could obtain atomic weapons from the North Korean regime.
But the administration's assessment rests on meager fresh evidence and limited, sometimes dated, intelligence, according to current and former U.S. and foreign officials.
Outside the administration, and in some quiet corners within it, there is nothing close to a consensus that North Korean scientists have succeeded in fabricating atomic bombs from plutonium, as the CIA concluded in a document made public last month.
Independent experts and some U.S. officials also are skeptical of administration claims that North Korea is within months of manufacturing material for more weapons at a secret uranium-enrichment plant.
Interviews with more than 30 current and former intelligence officials and diplomats in Asia, Europe and the United States provide an in-depth look at the development of North Korea's nuclear program, the regime's elaborate efforts to conceal it and the behind-the-scenes debate over how much danger it poses.
According to these officials:
My guess is that the North Koreans are having great difficulty with either miniaturizing an atomic bomb ( to make it effectively deliverable as a warhead) or with the trigger mechanism. I have no doubt that they have travelled quite far down the nuclear road but I doubt that they are holding back from a test detonation out of goodwill.
Miniaturization isn't really an issue with a first strike weapon. For that, you would be better off delivering it via Fed Ex than ICBM. As a deterrent weapon, you would need enough devices to be a credible threat, and I think they are a decade away from that. The US and USSR managed to ramp up faster than that, but with MUCH bigger industrial economies.
The trigger could be giving them problems, but that is just speculation on a laundry list of things that could be hanging them up. On this (like most intel issues) the question isn't proving that they have them; it is looking at whether or not we know that they don't have them, because if we say they don't and they do, the downside is so terrible that it cannot be dismissed as an acceptable risk.