North Korea: it IS nuclear rocket science

The military alert level has been raised a notch by South Korea and the US, signifying what’s deemed a “grave threat” posed by the North’s nuclear sabre-rattling.

Its state-controlled news agency, KCNA, said today that “even a minor accidental clash could lead to nuclear war.” I do wish they wouldn’t keep saying this sort of thing.

After our programme last night, I had a chance to discuss matters with two former British ambassadors to Pyongyang – John Everard and Dr J E Hoare – and ask them how alarmed they really were. Both said there was indeed good reason to be fearful, but agreed that North Korea was not yet in a position to actually launch a nuclear missile strike.

I read through the comments on my blog yesterday and checked in with ArmsControlWonk, as recommended by “Gridlock.”

There, I waded through screeds of top wonkage on S-waves and P-waves and kiloton yields and seismic wave magnitudes and the question of miniaturisation; the latter being the apparent crux of the issue. Can North Korea’s nuclear physicists actually make a bomb compact enough to attach it to a missile delivery system?

Still confused on this question though, I called independent British nuclear consultant John Large for his take. And yup: here’s the science:

“Unlike the Iranians, who went with uranium,” he explained, “the North Koreans went the plutonium 239 route. It’s a more reliable, but small, weapon that can’t be much bigger than a beach ball anyway.” (It even looks a bit like one if you check out his A-bomb schematics on this link – and click your way through to slide nine).

The key issue isn’t about how small you can get it,” said Mr Large. “It’s about how to match it up to a missile delivery system.”

On 29 April, the North Korean Foreign Ministry released a statement which said that if the UN didn’t apologise for condemning its ballistic missile launch in April, the DPRK would be compelled to take additional “self-defensive measures”.

“The measures will include,” it warned, “nuclear tests and test-firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

To John Large, that’s pretty interesting, because, he says, the bid to match up the plutonium to a rocket, will, in the absence of decent computer modelling technology up North, require a fair bit of “tweaking” which is done by repeated test-firing. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that the North has test-fired five short-range missiles since Monday.

“I would say were in the acceleration phase,” he went on. “Working on vibration, shock, acceleration… the tests are tweaking the weapons system, having already achieved optimum design for their atom bomb.”

Having worked on its nuclear programme on-and-off for 15 years, you can pretty much bet North Korea’s already got a small arsenal, but there is no IAEA inventory. No one knows how many nukes it’s got, but it’s clearly got enough to stick two fingers up at the rest of the world.

“It’s a very real threat,” says Mr Large. “When you have a weapon and you have a delivery system, you’ve got the complete kit. I would say that if you see a series of smaller rocket tests over the next three months, at the end of that period, they will have it.”

If that’s bad news, worse is that it’s too late to do anything.

Diplomatic carrots and sticks all failed. Sanctions hurt but failed too. You can’t just bomb the Yongbyon plutonium plant because fallout would drift over China and Russia and anyway, the arsenal’s probably stored in diverse locations.

Before this year’s out, the world will probably have to face up to the fact that North Korea will have joined Pakistan, India and Israel as the fourth non-NPT nuclear power.

After that, there’s just the dissuasive power of Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD) – i.e. that for Pyongyang to launch first would be suicide.