The Yomiuri Shimbun February 28, 2003
U.S. arms experts: Japan at risk from N. Korean missiles
By Yutaka Ishiguro
The majority view among U.S. weapons experts is that the nuclear weapon North Korea is suspected to possess is compact enough to be carried by that country's Rodong ballistic missile, which has a range of 1,350 kilometers, sufficient to reach almost every part of Japan.
It is tantamount to possession of nuclear missiles as the Rodong has been deployed, thereby constituting a grave security threat to Japan and its neighbors.
The strongest evidence for experts to presume that North Korea has cleared the technical barrier of developing a nuclear bomb that weighs less than the 1,000-kilogram payload the Rodong is capable of carrying are reports of powerful tests of explosives.
It has been reported that Pyongyang has conducted such tests several dozen times since 1998.
Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, speculates the tests were conducted by North Korea to acquire data to develop smaller nuclear devices of less than 200 kilograms.
Sokolski said he believed North Korea had already achieved the first step in the development of small nuclear weapons, which is a bomb weighing 1,000 kilograms.
The so-called Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 weighed 4,900 kilograms and yielded an explosive force equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. After 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union competed to build smaller nuclear bombs that could be carried by ballistic missiles.
The weight of these first-generation nuclear bombs, which had the same basic design as the Fat Man, was reduced to less than 1,000 kilograms.
North Korea has never held tests to confirm the power of their nuclear bombs, but, U.S. experts have stressed two points: the developments in nuclear science and technology over the last half-century could be easily obtained through published papers; and it has become easier to make detonators for nuclear bombs due to the development of more powerful explosives.
Michael Levi, strategic security project director of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), says it is reasonable to believe that North Korea could have developed a first-generation nuclear bomb weighing less than 1,000 kilograms.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity. org, a nonprofit nonpartisan organization founded in December 2000, said it was almost certain that North Korea has the capability to strike Japan with a first-generation nuclear weapon using its Rodong missile.
David Albright, a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, is of the same opinion.
The U.S. government has concluded, based on Central Intelligence Agency reports, that North Korea possesses one or two nuclear weapons made with plutonium extracted before 1992.
However, many Japanese security specialists, including Defense Agency officials, had believed that a North Korean nuclear bomb would weigh nearly 5,000 kilograms, which is too heavy to be carried on a Rodong missile.
According to the FAS, about 100 Rodong missiles have already been deployed. North Korea is also working on development of Taepodong 1 and Taepodong 2 missiles, which have a range of about 1,500 kilometers and 3,500 kilometers, respectively.
Copyright © 2003, The Yomiuri Shimbun
