New York Daily News October 11, 2006
Dubya's hunt for nuke proof
Spies' mission is to find if N. Korean blast was for real
By James Gordon Meek
WASHINGTON - President Bush sent America's spies scrambling yesterday to tell him whether North Korea detonated a nuclear bomb, as the regime claims.
"So far, we don't have a definitive answer for him," conceded a U.S. official familiar with the verification efforts underway.
The Air Force and CIA have sent Constant Phoenix spy planes over North Korea to "sniff" the air to try to detect radiation, sources said.
Seoul is also borrowing a sophisticated radioactivity detector from Sweden, Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety researchers said.
If there was a nuclear explosion, it would be almost impossible to prevent radiation from leaking into the atmosphere, a source briefed on ongoing collection operations told the Daily News.
But it may be two weeks or longer before Bush has his answer, sources said.
"It takes time to collect samples and then to analyze them," the intelligence source said.
Officials told The News that a "rigorous collection of airborne samples" will be key to solving the nuclear mystery.
"We don't have full confirmation yet of what really happened there, and we probably won't for a little while," Secretary of State Rice told Fox News.
Jittery officials briefly thought North Korea triggered a second explosion last night, but it turned out to be a strong earthquake in northern Japan.
While last night's tremors were quickly explained away, scientists and intelligence officers were still puzzling over the Monday shocker.
Immediately after Monday's announced detonation, several intelligence officials said early assessments of the relatively small blast hinted that it might have been only 200 tons of TNT, rather than a typical 2- to 3-kiloton nuclear bomb test.
"We can't rule out that they used conventional explosives," said an intelligence official. Or it could have been a failed nuclear test.
A North Korean diplomat said yesterday that the test worked, but was "smaller in scale than expected."
"The success in a small-scale [test] means a large-scale [test] is also possible," the North Korean diplomat claimed.
U.S. scientists are analyzing seismic data to see how much North Korea's explosion shook the Earth, according to White House spokesman Tony Snow.
"[The scientists] do know that there was a seismic event, presumably an explosion," Snow said. "But at this point, the analysts are being extremely careful. They want to make sure they don't outrun the facts."
"For a relatively low-yield test like this, the things that might be unique for a nuclear test might be hard to sort out," agreed John Pike, an analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, a defense research group.
© Copyright 2006, Daily News, L.P.
