N Korea may have 4 to 8 nuclear bombs next year: Report

[DuctapeFatwa]

North Korea's nuclear arsenal could reach four to eight bombs during the next year and increase by up to 13 additional bombs per year by the end of the decade, according to a London-based think-tank.

The time is running out on diplomatic efforts to halt the Pyongyang government's nuclear programme while it remains relatively small, the International Institute for Strategic Studies has said.

"What we're saying is in the near-term immediate future North Korea's ability to increase its nuclear arsenal is very limited," said Gary Samore, the report's principal author, who was senior director for non-proliferation and export controls at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.

"But as you go beyond that window it really begins to get into the range of dozens of nuclear weapons," he said. The institute's 120-page report cautioned that it was impossible to know for certain how many nuclear bombs, if any, North Korea currently possessed.

http://hindustantimes.com/news/181_542963,00050001.htm

[RichV]

1. Good thing we ignored them and went after Saddam, huh?

Yikes.

Now, is this all bullshit or not? I used to give the government the benefit of the doubt in these matters, but not anymore...

[windansea]

2. then again...maybe not

NewsweekJan. 26 issue - Stung by Saddam's disappearing WMD, the U.S. intelligence community is re-examining North Korea's supposed nukes program—and finding what one senior administration official called "uncomfortable parallels" with Iraq. In the summer of 2002, the Bush administration charged that the North had a secret program using high-speed centrifuges to enrich uranium. Stunningly, Pyongyang agreed—and raised the stakes by claiming to have extracted more plutonium from some 8,000 stockpiled reactor fuel rods. True?—or nuclear blackmail to get food and aid? Earlier this month North Korean officials told a U.S. delegation that they had no nuclear weapons, nor a secret uranium-enrichment program. The team is to report to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing this week. But their debriefings to official Washington have already caused a stir because of skepticism about the intel community's WMD work. (The CIA denies any North Korea review was prompted by the Iraq experience.) On North Korea, doubters point out that plutonium reprocessing plants give off signature emissions. After one whiff detected last summer, U.S. sensors ringing North Korea have picked up nothing since. The United States and Germany did block one North Korea-bound consignment of aluminum tubes of centrifuge specs, but those would have equipped only a pilot plant. Most fundamentally, sources say, the United States has no evidence that North Korea has ever mastered the ferocious technical challenge of turning plutonium into a usable weapon.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3989729/

[daleo]

3. They are probably safe from invasion

Unless there is some offshore oil coming into play.