(Updates) Breaking News: North Korea May Have Nuclear Missile ‘Within Grasp’

UPDATE II:

Excerpts from comments by Secretary of State John Kerry on questions about the Korean situation during a joint press conference with Republic of Korea Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se on April 12, 2013:

Well, if North Korea decides to fire the Musudan missile, which they have threatened to, and which people have been following, it would really be one more unnecessary, unfortunate, unwanted contribution to an already volatile, potentially dangerous situation. And so it would indicate, really, who is being provocative with an exclamation point yet again.

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So it’s up to Kim Jong-un what he decides to do. It’s not going to change our current position, which is very, very clear. We will defend our allies. We will stand with South Korea, Japan, and others against these threats. And we will defend ourselves. And Kim Jong-un needs to understand, as I think he probably does, what the outcome of the conflict would be…

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… If Kim Jong-un decides to launch a missile, whether it’s across the Sea of Japan or some other direction, he will be choosing, willfully, to ignore the entire international community, his own obligations that he has accepted, and it will be a provocative and unwanted act that will raise people’s temperature with respect to this issue. It should – I would say ahead of time that it is a huge mistake for him to choose to do that, because it will further isolate this country and further isolate his people who, frankly, are desperate for food, not missile launches, for people who are desperate for opportunity, not for a leader who wants to flex his muscles in this manner, that takes everybody to a bad place.

Now, with respect to the type of weapon or what they may have and the threats that he is making, let me make it clear – and this is the Pentagon’s assessment that I’m giving you – it is inaccurate to suggest that the DPRK has fully tested, developed, or demonstrated capabilities that are articulated in that report. So we do not operate under the presumption that they have that fully tested and available capacity. But obviously, they have conducted a nuclear test, so there’s some kind of device. But that is very different from miniaturization and delivery and from tested delivery and other things.

Does it get you closer to a line that is more dangerous? Yes. And that is precisely why we are standing here together at this moment, talking about the need to move in a better and different direction. And our hope is that in the next days, in my conversations in China and conversations in Japan, that we will find the unity necessary to provide a very different set of alternatives for how we can proceed and ultimately defuse this situation.

Final comment: I couldn’t make it more clear from our point of view. President Obama ordered a number of exercises not to be undertaken. I think we have lowered our rhetoric significantly, and we are attempting to find a way for reasonableness to prevail here. And we are seeking a partner to deal with in a rational and reasonable way. Our hope is that the vision expressed by President Park for negotiations and for a peaceful track is a vision that we can move too quickly. Because let’s face it, everybody here knows this: we’ve got enough problems to deal with around the world, and we don’t need some individual activities by one particular person threatening destruction and mayhem, chaos, in the ways that we’re seeing, no matter how based in reality it may be.

The greatest danger here, we all agree, is for a mistake. The greatest danger is that something happens and there’s a response to that something, and then things somehow inadvertently were to get out of control. And so we call on Kim Jong-un to recognize that this is a moment for responsible leadership and it’s a moment to try to reach for the good possibilities, not try to guarantee the bad ones.

Read more here

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UPDATE I:

Department of Defense Press Secretary George Little has issued the following statement on North Korea’s Nuclear Capability

In today’s House Armed Services Committee hearing on the Department of Defense budget, a member of the committee read an unclassified passage in a classified report on North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. While I cannot speak to all the details of a report that is classified in its entirety, it would be inaccurate to suggest that the North Korean regime has fully tested, developed, or demonstrated the kinds of nuclear capabilities referenced in the passage. The United States continues to closely monitor the North Korean nuclear program and calls upon North Korea to honor its international obligations.

Added: The Congressman in question is Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo. According to an AP report, “The reading seemed to take Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by surprise, who said he hadn’t seen the report and declined to answer questions about it.”
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Original Post:

Most know that North Korea has developed a nuclear weapons capability. Most believe that North Korea has the capability of launching long-range ballistic missiles that can reach U.S. territory.

Today, the New York Times reports the breaking news that North Korea may have been able to “marry” those two capabilities, i.e. that North Korea “has learned how to make a nuclear weapon small enough to be delivered by a ballistic missile.”

The Defense Intelligence Agency has reached such a conclusion with “moderate confidence” and has delivered this assessment to senior administration officials and members of Congress.

If it is any consolation, the assessment “cautions that the weapon’s ‘reliability will be low,’ apparently a reference to the North’s difficulty in developing accurate missiles or, perhaps, to the huge technical challenges of designing a warhead that can survive the rigors of flight and detonate on a specific target,” according to the Times.

It may also be a consolation — of a different kind — to some that:

It is unclear whether other American intelligence agencies agree with the assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which has primary responsibility for monitoring the missile capabilities of adversary nations. In the case of Iraq, a decade ago, the agency was among those that argued most vociferously that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons.