Analysts fear a dramatic advance in North Korea’s nuclear
missile technology, revealed inadvertently during a Congressional
hearing Thursday, will quickly find its way to Iran — forcing Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fast-track a long-contemplated
attack against Tehran’s nuclear-enrichment facilities.
Pentagon officials are playing down a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency
assessment that North Korea probably has the ability to miniaturize a
nuclear weapon and place it on an ICBM. U.S. officials say that
miniaturization capability, if it exists, is untested and unreliable.
In February, North Korea detonated what is described as a “lighter,
miniaturized atomic bomb.” At the time, there was speculation this could
signal the Hermit Kingdom had developed a nuclear warhead that it could
place on its long-range missiles. Pentagon officials, however,
continued to insist North Korea was at least a year away from developing
that capability.
Jerusalem Post defense analyst Yaakov Katz, author of “Israel vs. Iran:
The Shadow War,” tells Newsmax that U.S. and Israeli intelligence
officials have generally agreed that it would take Iran six to 12 months
to build a nuclear device once it tried to break out and enrich its
material from the 20-percent to the 90-percent level required. Beyond
that, intelligence experts have projected, it would then take Iran
another year or two to produce a miniaturized warhead that could be
installed on a missile.
Now, Katz says, the time lag between reaching nuclear capability and
Iran’s ability to arm a missile with a nuclear warhead appears to have
vanished. That means Thursday’s revelation could reduce Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s nonmilitary options against Iran, forcing the
Jewish state to step up its timetable for attacking the Persian nation
should it acquire enough enriched uranium to be a significant threat.
“If the North Koreans are much more advanced than we assumed, then that
could mean that when the Iranians surge to move forward, that the whole
time frame would change also,” Katz tells Newsmax. “It would mean Israel
and the West would have to revisit the time frames that they’ve put in
for the Iranians, and that could be much shorter now — which means your
window of opportunity [to attack] is also becoming smaller.”
Experts say Israel would have to assume that any North Korean
miniaturization technology would soon find its way into the hands of
Iran’s mullahs. In fact, it is possible Iranian technology enabled North
Korea’s push to miniaturize its warheads — the step that makes them
capable of being installed on an ICBM. There is widespread agreement in
the intelligence community that the two embattled nations routinely
exchange technology, and sometimes military hardware as well.
“That’s no secret,” says Katz. “There’s been a lot of cooperation between the Iranians and the North Koreans.”
He adds: “Israel has always made the assessment that whatever is going
on in North Korea, you have to assume it’s also … taking place in Iran.
So that technical cooperation is still working.”
Obama administration officials have been downplaying the immediate
threat from North Korea, even as the Pentagon rushed a THAAD missile
interceptor system, which had not been scheduled to enter service until
2015, to Guam to protect American interests. It also announced it would
revive the Bush-era plan to add 14 more interceptors to the missile
shield that protects America’s West Coast, which it had previously
canceled.
The news that one U.S. intelligence agency believes North Korea already
has achieved the ability to design nuclear-missile warheads was
inadvertently disclosed by GOP Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado on Thursday
during a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. He was reading a
portion of a classified document that had been erroneously marked
declassified.
That disclosure means Israeli leaders must now assume the window between
the moment Iran acquires nuclear capability, and the horrific moment
when it could launch an attack on a major Israeli city such as Tel Aviv,
would be a matter of months or weeks rather than years, experts say.
That North Korea has helped Iran bolster its missile technology is well
established. In recent years, as Iranian technology surpassed that of
North Korea, the technical assistance flowed the other way as well,
sources say.
According to Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Bruce Klingner:
“Clearly there has been a decades-long missile relationship, and it
began with a one-way sale of missiles to Iran. … Over time it became a
two-way, collaborative relationship.”
Klingner adds that a collaborative relationship between the two rogue
nations on nuclear technology “is beyond question,” although much more
difficult to assess due to its secretive nature.
One example of that cooperation: A February 2010 diplomatic cable
released by the WikiLeaks organization revealed that Iran had obtained
19 advanced North Korean missiles with a Russian design known as R-27.
The R-27 was initially used aboard Soviet submarines to launch nuclear
missiles. At the time, analysts predicted the acquisition of the R-27
would enable Iran to reverse-engineer a new class of missiles with
greater range and payloads.
“Every once in a while, you hear reports a North Korean scientist has
popped up in Iran or vice versa,” Human Events senior writer John
Hayward tells Newsmax.
“We have been assuming … we’ll know the exact moment when Iran has
everything it needs to make a devastating weapon,” Hayward adds. “But it
seems from today’s news we don’t really have that confidence anymore.
We don’t know where either Iran or North Korea really is.”
Intelligence experts have decried the dearth of U.S. “humint,” or human
intelligence, from North Korea. As for Iran, Israeli intelligence is
believed to have both human and electronic intelligence sources. While
North Korea’s capabilities are often opaque, Katz says intelligence
officers in Israel and the West have “always been quite confident” that
they will know almost immediately should Iran try to break out and
enrich its uranium to be nuclear-weapons capable. And so far that has
not occurred.
In his September speech to the United Nations, Netanyahu spoke of a “red
line” that Iran must not be allowed to cross. He also stressed that
time was already running out to rein in Iran’s nuclear activities.
“Each day, that point is getting closer,” he said. “That’s why I speak
today with such a sense of urgency. And that’s why everyone should have a
sense of urgency. … The relevant question is not when Iran will get the
bomb. The relevant question is at what stage can we no longer stop Iran
from getting the bomb.”
Thursday’s revelation hardly marked the first time national-security
experts have underestimated the Hermit Kingdom’s nuclear progress. Just
months before the CIA announced in January 1994 that North Korea
probably had developed nuclear weapons, U.S. diplomats were negotiating
with North Korea in the belief there was still time to reach an
agreement.
Now, U.S. analysts appear once again to have underestimated its capabilities.
Before the DIA analysis was revealed, Michael A. Dodge of the
conservative Heritage Foundation told Newsmax: “North Korea has
demonstrated the basic technology to hit the U.S.; the question is
whether they can miniaturize the nukes to put on the missiles. We think
we have some time before they can do that, but in the past we have had a
tendency to underestimate the North Korean threat.”
Hayward of Human Events doubts Israel would take action against Iran
while the U.S. national security apparatus is on tenterhooks over North
Korea. But he says the news that North Korea may have mastered the
ability to miniaturize its nuclear weapons and put them on a ballistic
missile has moved up Netanyahu’s red line for unilaterally launching an
attack on Iran’s nuclear-enrichment facilities.
“He believes that ‘moderate confidence’ assessment, and he has said many
times they can’t afford to take risks. That was the whole point of that
speech where he drew the bomb on that piece of paper at the U.N. He was
busy explaining: ‘We can’t gamble;
we can’t suppose they’re years away when they’re not. We have to stop this before it crosses a certain point.’
“And if you’ll remember, that ‘certain point’ was basically getting
things that are small enough to be assembled in locations that are
almost impossible to strike, and then getting them into ballistic
missiles. It’s not just the missile capability. It’s the fact that once
you get there, it becomes very difficult to stop the process. So I think
he may see that red line being right on top of him.”
In December, North Korea launched a Unha-3 missile that placed an object
into orbit. U.S. officials have estimated the range of that missile at
some 6,200 miles, sufficient to threaten Guam, Hawaii, Alaska, and the
U.S. West Coast. The Musudan missiles North Korea is expected to launch
in coming days have a much shorter range, about 2,500 miles. But that
still puts Japan and Guam well within range. The United states has
28,000 military personnel in South Korea; 40,000 in Japan; and Guam, a
U.S. territory, has a population of approximately 160,000. It also hosts
major U.S. Navy and Air Force bases.
In recent days the administration has responded to the North Korean
threat by rushing advanced radar systems and anti-missile capabilities
to the Pacific theater, and decided to beef up its missile interceptor
capability on the West Coast.
Says Klingner: “I think the Obama administration’s reversal on the
missile interceptor programs was the administration getting caught
flat-footed apparently, supposedly by the long-standing North Korean
nuclear and missile threat. … They based it on a sudden, unexpected
acceleration of the Korean missile threat. Well, it was not.”
In fact, Klingner tells Newsmax, a 2001 intelligence assessment
predicted that by 2015, at the current rate of progress, the United
States would face an ICBM threat from North Korea.
Former U.S. ambassador to North Korea Christopher Hill, meanwhile, told
Fox News on Friday that the Pentagon’s insistence that North Korea has
yet to test the accuracy of its nuclear-missile technology is largely
irrelevant. Whether the DIA’s projection, which is made with “moderate”
rather than “high” confidence, is accurate now misses the larger point,
he says.
“Sooner or later that report is going to be correct, so the same old
question is, what are we going to do about it? … We’ve got to make very
clear that we are not going to accept this,” Hill said.
He added that North Korea’s bellicose missile launches and nuclear-arms
development must now be the No. 1 diplomatic issue between the United
States and China.
