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Uncovering North Korea's nukes
By Joe Havely CNN Hong Kong
(CNN) -- Whether or not North Korea is a member of the so-called "nuclear club" has troubled Western intelligence services for years. Despite years of denials -- or, more often, just plain stony silence -- there is little doubt that since the early 1980s North Korea has been actively seeking to develop its own nuclear weapons. Now, for the first time, North Korea has formally admitted it has a nuclear program. Furthermore, it says, it has continued with work to build its own bomb despite a 1994 agreement with the United States that was supposed to see all such efforts abandoned. That Pyongyang has been able to keep its nuclear weapons program so secret for so long is no real surprise. North Korea is one of the world's most reclusive countries with a massive, almost Orwellian, capability for controlling information. Under the terms of the so-called Framework Agreement in 1994 North Korea agreed to decommission and pull down its nuclear weapons facilities in return for the U.S-led construction of two advanced light-water reactors that do not produce material suitable for nuclear bombs. It now seems, on its own admission, that the North decided to keep going. But despite that admission, questions remain over how far advanced Pyongyang's bomb making program actually is and whether or not it already has a working bomb. Certainly the North has not conducted any full-blown nuclear tests -- that would have been detected too easily and in any case would have used up valuable weapons-grade material. However, analysts say the fact no actual North Korean test has been seen is no proof Pyongyang doesn't already have a viable bomb. Given a powerful enough computer and enough technical know-how, a simulated "virtual" test can give an accurate picture of a nuclear device's capabilities. Weapons-grade
In 1994, as the United States and North Korea lurched towards a military showdown over the issue, the CIA estimated North Korea had extracted enough weapons-grade plutonium for one or possibly two bombs. On top of that, agency officials said, North Korea was busy working on the means to deliver a nuclear payload anywhere within the continental U.S. That, however, was eight years ago. If we are to assume its nuclear program continued unabated, then the possibility exists -- assuming those initial estimates were correct -- that North Korea could be sitting on a small but very deadly nuclear stockpile. The problem is that much of this is conjecture. It could equally well be the case that North Korea, a deeply paranoid but nonetheless cash-strapped country, could simply be bluffing. Attempts to gather hard intelligence data on North Korea's bomb-making program have been frustrated by the government's intensive efforts at deception. Almost all of the North's nuclear research, manufacturing and testing facilities are thought to have been built deep underground, away from the prying eyes of U.S. spy satellites. Know-how
Nonetheless if North Korea does indeed have the bomb, or the capabilities to do so, where did it acquire the technical know-how? Dr Ron Huisken of the Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, says in the early days the most likely sources would have been Cold War rivals China and Russia. "They have both been close partners of North Korea and, at various times, they have both been rivals to be close partners with North Korea," he says. More recently, he says, the possibility exists that Russian scientists, underpaid or unemployed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, may have offered their services to Pyongyang. "Certainly there have been cases of those scientists cropping up in the Middle East," Huisken says. "So the possibility exists too that some Soviet-trained scientists could have been seduced into working for North Korea."
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