Hillary has found an issue. Reminds me of JFK's rant about the "missile gap." when he ran in 59. He knew it was a phony, but Nixon couldn't refute it without revealing intel info. In this case, the NK's were merrily working on the bomb while taking aid from Bubba. But the Dems will work it for all it's worth.
"Put simply, they couldn't do that when George Bush became president, and now they can."
Nuclear arms advance seen in North Korea
2005-04-30 / New York Times /
The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency said Thursday that American intelligence agencies believed North Korea had mastered the technology for arming its missiles with nuclear warheads, an assessment that if correct, means the North could build weapons to threaten Japan and perhaps the western United States.
While Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, the Defense Intelligence Agency chief, said in Senate testimony that North Korea had been judged to have the "capability" to put a nuclear weapon atop its missiles, he stopped well short of saying it had done so, or even that it had assembled warheads small enough for the purpose. Nor did he give evidence to back up his view during the public session of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Still, his assessment of North Korea's progress exceeded what officials have publicly declared before.
When asked by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York during a hearing on Thursday whether "North Korea has the ability to arm a missile with a nuclear device," Admiral Jacoby responded, "The assessment is that they have the capability to do that, yes ma'am."
At a White House news conference on Thursday, U.S. President George W. Bush said that given the uncertainties, he was worried about the progress North Korea had made on its nuclear program under its leader, Kim Jong Il. "There is concern about his capacity to deliver," he said. "We don't know if he can or not, but I think it's best when dealing with a tyrant like Kim Jong Il to assume that he can."
In 2003, the United States warned South Korea and Japan that satellite imagery had identified an advanced nuclear testing site in a remote corner of North Korea where equipment had been set up to test conventional explosives that could compress a plutonium core and set off a compact nuclear explosion.
Since then, American investigators have been pressing Pakistan for details about the kind of technology North Korea might have been given, perhaps in conjunction with visits to Pakistani nuclear sites. North Korea supplied Pakistan with many missiles it for its nuclear arsenal.
Building a nuclear warhead that can be delivered by a missile requires the technical sophistication to make it small and light. North Korea has never conducted a test that would prove it could manufacture a warhead, though in recent days anxiety has risen in Washington and among North Korea's Asian neighbors that the country could conduct a test in an effort to force the world to deal with it as a nuclear state.
To field a working nuclear missile, North Korea would also have to conduct new tests of its missiles themselves and of their payloads, including such complex components as heat shields for re-entry of the warhead. North Korea's last significant missile test, in 1998, overshot Japan and would not have been able to reach United States territory.
North Korea is considered one of the most opaque intelligence targets for American analysts, and the absence of reliable human spies has made it more difficult to understand the progress of its program.
Admiral Jacoby said North Korea's ability to deliver a nuclear warhead to the continental United States remained "a theoretical capability" because its Taepo Dong 2 missile had not been flight tested. But he added that American intelligence agencies judged that a two-stage Taepo Dong could strike parts of the American West Coast and that a three-stage variant could probably reach all of North America.
In an interview on Thursday, Clinton called Admiral Jacoby's statement "the first confirmation, publicly, by the administration that the North Koreans have the ability to arm a missile with a nuclear device that can reach the United States," adding, "Put simply, they couldn't do that when George Bush became president, and now they can." |
