When analysts offer a range of possibilities about future nuclear and missile threats, the typical journalistic response is to hype the worst of the cases presented. Thus, the lead in most stories about a new report on growth in North Korea’s strategic arsenal focused on the dire prediction that by 2020 Pyongyang could have up to 100 nuclear warheads. Such a ten-fold increase over the IISS strategic dossier estimate in 2011 would put North Korea on par with current arsenal estimates for Israel, India and Pakistan.
Joel Wit, a Senior Fellow at the US–Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and co-founder of the website 38 North, did us all a service in leading an intensive study of ‘North Korea’s Nuclear Futures’, the results of which were published on 26 February. The report draws on an analysis by David Albright of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, who assessed the build-up to date in North Korea’s nuclear capability and presented three possibilities for how this might further develop. Wit’s report adds missile projections to the scenarios.
It is clear that North Korea’s strategic capabilities are dramatically expanding. As summarised in the latest IISS Military Balance, an expansion of fissile-material infrastructure, a heightened tempo of rocket launches and the appearance of new missile systems attest to the increasing security challenges faced by the North’s neighbours.
Given that North Korea has been working on warheads for 30 years, I agree with the assessment in the ‘Nuclear Futures’ report that the country is able to miniaturise plutonium-based weapons to fit onto Nodong missiles capable of reaching much of Japan. This is only a judgment, however, and one with which the South Koran Defence Ministry disagrees. Much of the press coverage of the ‘Nuclear Futures’ report misstates the certainty of the assumption. Reading that ‘Pyongyang is currently believed to have 10–16 nuclear weapons, four to eight of them based on weapons-grade uranium’, I ask: who believes?
North Korea may well have uranium-based weapons. After all, in November 2010, it displayed a modern uranium-enrichment facility housing 2,000 P-2 centrifuges, a number which appears to have recently doubled, judging from overhead imagery of the facility roof. However, no outsider knows how well the centrifuges work. It is worth recalling that Iran received the P-2 design from Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan almost 20 years ago, but never got it to operate well. Iran has done better with variations of the P-2 model, but still has not operated them beyond R&D-level numbers. Can North Korea really do better?
If North Korea and Iran have been sharing nuclear technology, as is often presumed, then it would stand to reason that their P-2 models would function similarly. But we should reserve doubt about nuclear cooperation. Among the assumptions in Albright’s medium projection for growth in North Korea’s arsenal is that the country will benefit from nuclear cooperation with Iran. If Tehran reaches a nuclear deal with the six powers, as now appears increasingly probable, it is unlikely to jeopardise the benefits of such an agreement by sharing nuclear secrets with Pyongyang.
Predictions about a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) threat against the US mainland also make me cautious. Too often in the past, dire predictions have been made about emerging missile threats from potential adversaries. In 1998, for example, the Rumsfeld Commission concluded that Iran would be able to test an ICBM within five years. More recent US intelligence estimates have posited 2015 as the year by which Iran would likely flight test an ICBM. As Greg Thielmann of the Arms Control Association recently wrote in an aptly-named blog post on ‘Iran’s overdue ICBM’, that is not likely to happen.
Notwithstanding my caution about some of the assumptions, I advocate close attention to Wit’s work. For several years now, he has argued that the US policy of ‘strategic patience’ toward North Korea is failing. His suggested approach, which he conveyed at a 2012 talk at Arundel House, is proactive engagement. Although the Obama Administration was burnt when it tried this by means of the 2011 ‘Leap Day deal’ that Pyongyang promptly scuttled by testing a space rocket, Washington has of late been gingerly trying again. In late January, US Special Representative for North Korea Policy Sung Kim offered to meet with his North Korean counterpart in Beijing. For one reason or another, including an incomprehensible quarantine policy toward travellers to prevent Ebola from reaching the country, Pyongyang demurred.
Whether or not engagement is the best answer, an underlying message in Wit’s report is that attention must be paid and action taken to counter the North Korean strategic challenge. I agree.
Mark Fitzpatrick is Director of the IISS Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Programme.