SEOUL — With its detonation Tuesday of a “smaller and light” nuclear device, North Korea moved closer to its top technological goal: building an atomic weapon small enough to mount on a long-range missile.
Such a capability, if North Korea achieves it, would turn the secretive police state from a regional menace into a global one and raise the stakes for neighboring and Western countries, including the United States, that have so far been unable to influence Pyongyang’s behavior.
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Timeline: Highs and lows in the relationship between North and South Korea
Security analysts cautioned there is no immediate way to verify the North’s claim that it has successfully manufactured a smaller — or miniaturized — warhead, and they added that the North sometimes exaggerates its claims. Still, the country’s latest nuclear test marks the clearest sign yet of its intentions and could be followed by subsequent blasts — tests that are necessary if the North wants full confidence that its nuclear devices work reliably, analysts say.
The North hinted at such a path Tuesday, with its Foreign Ministry saying in a statement that it was prepared to take unspecified “second and third stronger steps in succession” if the United States maintained its “hostile approach” toward the North.
Tuesday’s test was conducted in the face of strong opposition from the United States and its allies. It also drew sharp condemnation from China, North Korea’s strongest patron. President Obama said the North’s weapons program represented a “threat to U.S. national security and to international peace and security.”
The North detonated its device in a sealed tunnel carved horizontally into a remote North Korean mountain, setting off a brief seismic wave. The explosion appeared to be slightly more powerful than nuclear tests carried out by Pyongyang in 2006 and 2009.
This was the first test carried out under Kim Jong Eun, the young, third-generation leader who appears to favor the us-against-everybody militancy honed by his father and grandfather, with the United States characterized as the archenemy foil.
“These provocations do not make North Korea more secure,” said Obama, who on Tuesday evening is expected to call for nuclear arms reductions in his State of the Union speech. “Far from achieving its stated goal of becoming a strong and prosperous nation, North Korea has instead increasingly isolated and impoverished its people through its ill-advised pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery.”
If North Korea is taken at its word, it now has a device — weighing less than 1,000 kilograms, or 2,200 pounds — that is “missile-deliverable,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an East Asia nonproliferation expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
“This does make them more of a threat,” Lewis said.
Still, said Siegfried Hecker, a scientist who has visited the North’s nuclear facilities several times, “such a weapon can only be used in a suicide attempt,” because any attack by North Korea would draw such a strong counter-attack. “My opinion is, no, it’s not a game-changer,” Hecker said. “In the end, what it does, it makes the North Korean deterrent more credible.”
Such a capability, if North Korea achieves it, would turn the secretive police state from a regional menace into a global one and raise the stakes for neighboring and Western countries, including the United States, that have so far been unable to influence Pyongyang’s behavior.
Graphic
Timeline: Highs and lows in the relationship between North and South Korea
Security analysts cautioned there is no immediate way to verify the North’s claim that it has successfully manufactured a smaller — or miniaturized — warhead, and they added that the North sometimes exaggerates its claims. Still, the country’s latest nuclear test marks the clearest sign yet of its intentions and could be followed by subsequent blasts — tests that are necessary if the North wants full confidence that its nuclear devices work reliably, analysts say.
The North hinted at such a path Tuesday, with its Foreign Ministry saying in a statement that it was prepared to take unspecified “second and third stronger steps in succession” if the United States maintained its “hostile approach” toward the North.
Tuesday’s test was conducted in the face of strong opposition from the United States and its allies. It also drew sharp condemnation from China, North Korea’s strongest patron. President Obama said the North’s weapons program represented a “threat to U.S. national security and to international peace and security.”
The North detonated its device in a sealed tunnel carved horizontally into a remote North Korean mountain, setting off a brief seismic wave. The explosion appeared to be slightly more powerful than nuclear tests carried out by Pyongyang in 2006 and 2009.
This was the first test carried out under Kim Jong Eun, the young, third-generation leader who appears to favor the us-against-everybody militancy honed by his father and grandfather, with the United States characterized as the archenemy foil.
“These provocations do not make North Korea more secure,” said Obama, who on Tuesday evening is expected to call for nuclear arms reductions in his State of the Union speech. “Far from achieving its stated goal of becoming a strong and prosperous nation, North Korea has instead increasingly isolated and impoverished its people through its ill-advised pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery.”
If North Korea is taken at its word, it now has a device — weighing less than 1,000 kilograms, or 2,200 pounds — that is “missile-deliverable,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an East Asia nonproliferation expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
“This does make them more of a threat,” Lewis said.
Still, said Siegfried Hecker, a scientist who has visited the North’s nuclear facilities several times, “such a weapon can only be used in a suicide attempt,” because any attack by North Korea would draw such a strong counter-attack. “My opinion is, no, it’s not a game-changer,” Hecker said. “In the end, what it does, it makes the North Korean deterrent more credible.”