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posted by martyb on Thursday August 10 2017, @01:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-would-YOU-do? dept.

A confidential Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence asessment has concluded that North Korea has miniaturized a nuclear warhead to make it capable of being launched by its ballistic missiles:

The analysis, completed last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency, comes on the heels of another intelligence assessment that sharply raises the official estimate for the total number of bombs in the communist country's atomic arsenal. The United States calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some independent experts think the number is much smaller.

[...] Although more than a decade has passed since North Korea's first nuclear detonation, many analysts thought it would be years before the country's weapons scientists could design a compact warhead that could be delivered by missile to distant targets. But the new assessment, a summary document dated July 28, concludes that this critical milestone has been reached.

"The IC [intelligence community] assesses North Korea has produced nuclear weapons for ballistic missile delivery, to include delivery by ICBM-class missiles," the assessment states, in an excerpt read to The Washington Post. Two U.S. officials familiar with the assessment verified its broad conclusions. It is not known whether the reclusive regime has successfully tested the smaller design, although North Korea officially claimed last year that it had done so.

Meanwhile, President Trump and Kim Jong Un have traded barbs:

President Donald Trump appears to have painted himself into a corner: He must now follow up on his pledge of hitting North Korea with "fire and fury," or he risks further blowing U.S. credibility.

Kim Jong-un's regime said late on Tuesday that it may strike Guam. That came shortly after Trump warned Pyongyang it would face "power, the likes of which this world has never seen before" if the renegade state continued to threaten the U.S.

"If the red line he drew today was 'North Korea cannot threaten the U.S. anymore,' that line was crossed within an hour of him making that statement," said John Delury, associate professor of Chinese studies at Seoul-based Yonsei University.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:31PM (4 children)

    by Beryllium Sphere (r) (5062) on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:31PM (#551711)

    North Korea is a nearly impossible intelligence target. We know shockingly little about what goes on there.

    How, then, could the intelligence community be so certain about the most intimate details of the most closely guarded military program there?

    The report is from un-named sources. Are those sources even part of the DPRK analysis team, or is this a political leak of alternative facts to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels"?

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:38PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:38PM (#551716) Journal

    There may be covert means of gathering the intelligence, such as covert acoustic devices. :^)

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday August 10 2017, @06:29PM

    by Arik (4543) on Thursday August 10 2017, @06:29PM (#551792) Journal
    Report is unimpeachable, comes straight from the chair of Lockheed.

    Buy more interceptors!
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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 10 2017, @07:07PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 10 2017, @07:07PM (#551811)

    How, then, could the intelligence community

    Actually, its from one of our eighteen or so intel agencies and the other seventeen or so disagree or consider it classified so won't comment. And no one else on the planet thinks its the case.

    The odds of this being true are not much better than the "Russians hacked da election" narrative, which is also pretty comical.

    My guess is the whole thing is made up diplomatic signalling. Toss out an idea see what happens.

    sixty nukes is a lot of material. It took a lot of time and money for the USA (and presumably the USSR) to get that much. The only way they're getting that much is a donor, kinda like Israel's nukes.

    Possibly someone messed up and they have 60 bunkers (can't hit them all simultaneously and be completely certain) or 60 delivery vehicles etc. As a MAD deterrent if I were a mad dictator I would totally ship 60 missiles with 54 lead weight duds and 6 real ones. If you have one base with one bunker thats getting the cruise missile treatment like tomorrow morning, why even bother building it. If you have 6 bombs in 6 launchers at 6 sites you're getting the simultaneous attack treatment, again why even bother building it. If you have 60 targets, well, nobody is crazy enough to attack you first. So I am pretty sure they got 60 nuke sites, almost entirely filled with fake warheads. If you're feeling REALLY lucky you might try to hit all 60, but what if you only get 58 and one of the two remaining launches on Hawaii or whatever? My gut level guess is they have 6 warheads with 50:50 odds of any given one working, and about 54 identical decoys. If their security is any good, there's no one human on the planet who knows where all six MAD deterrents are at any given time, party line will be all 60 are live.

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday August 10 2017, @11:21PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday August 10 2017, @11:21PM (#551933) Journal

    I don't think that's necessarily so. The uncle of a girl I dated once worked at a listening station in Taegu. They could hear handheld radio traffic north of the DMZ. If there's any communication that is happening electronically or anything that can be seen from a satellite, they know about it. Also, it's pretty possible that in a country like NK they would have a pretty good idea where Kim is at any time because it's not a place where scads and scads of billionaires gad about in limousine motorcades. Yes, they could try a fake out and transport him around in a non-descript taxi, but then again there aren't scads and scads of taxis or regular cars moving around. Mathematically it just seems pretty feasible to find the right pattern for traffic that matches where the guy is known to have been and when he was there. That's how I'd do it, but I'm sure there are far more tricks up the sleeves of the various intelligence agencies to nail down his whereabouts.

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