WASHINGTON -- North Korea might conduct another nuclear-weapon test in the coming weeks or months, despite international condemnation of the Stalinist regime's blast earlier this week, according to a senior U.S. defense official (see GSN, May 26).
(May. 29) -
South Korean activists burn placards during a protest of North Korea's nuclear test. Pyongyang might conduct another nuclear test in the near future, a high-level U.S. official said Wednesday (Kim Jae-hwan/Getty Images).
"We don't know how much [fissile] material that they have," the Pentagon official, who asked not to be identified, said in a Wednesday interview. "We don't know how much of what they have they want to expend on tests."
However, multiple nuclear tests are "quite possible," the official told Global Security Newswire.
The Monday event was North Korea's second underground explosion, following a 2006 test that many regard as a partial failure. Russian scientists initially pegged the latest blast as having a 20-kiloton nuclear yield, but more recent estimates of its destructive power are considerably lower.
More than 2 1/2 years separated the first and second nuclear tests. This time around, the detonations might not come to as rapid an end.
The North Korean Foreign Ministry on April 29 announced an intention to conduct multiple "nuclear tests," as well as "test-firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles."
Pyongyang on April 5 fired a ballistic missile that it claimed launched a satellite into orbit, but many experts believe was a test of its long-range weapons technology (see GSN, April 6). The regime has also carried out six short-range missile test shots this week (see related GSN story, today).
In response to international criticism of the April test, North Korea suspended its participation in nuclear disarmament talks with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The regime also ejected international monitors and prepared to resume plutonium reprocessing activities (see GSN, April 27).
Some U.S. analysts take quite seriously North Korea's April warning about the potential for multiple test blasts.
"We are now at one nuclear test and counting," Joshua Pollack, a proliferation consultant, wrote this week on ArmsControlWonk.com, a well regarded expert blog.
Those who monitor North Korea's secretive government say the reckoning about whether it should stage another test could involve a combination of factors, including a desire to increase bargaining leverage with Washington and its allies; display power as an internal succession plan for ailing leader Kim Jong Il evolves; and develop its capability to mate nuclear warheads with delivery vehicles.
However, the senior defense official said more international focus should be placed on how North Korea behaves in the community of nations.
"We're not so much concerned about their internal calculus as we are [about] their rampant disregard for international law, for directives from the United Nations, for international opinion, for the will of the community [or] the welfare of their neighbors," the official said.
U.S. intelligence agencies are reported to have tracked increased movement around the test site in a mountainous area northeast of Pyongyang in the days prior to the underground blast. Washington is said to have deployed sensor equipment to the region to help assess the magnitude of an experimental detonation.
Despite detecting test preparations, in Washington "there appears to have been a firm and widely held conviction that North Korea would not test again until it had more plutonium in hand," Pollack wrote yesterday in a second blog. "Potential indications of an imminent test may have been discounted on that basis."
Other experts also have said the Obama administration was surprised that the test occurred so soon, apparently believing beforehand that the observed preparations would continue for some time.
Any additional nuclear tests in the coming weeks would be limited by Pyongyang's "minimal plutonium supply" and might have to await further reprocessing, Siegfried Hecker of Stanford University wrote Tuesday in an online Foreign Policy piece.
Prior to the Monday experiment, Pyongyang was estimated to have enough nuclear material for fewer than 10 warheads.
"There's a morbid joke around that we should encourage them to keep testing so they use their plutonium up," said one defense policy expert who spoke on condition of anonymity.
An Obama administration decision to keep mum about the North Korean test preparations in the days leading up to the event is prompting some experts to brand the incident as a missed diplomatic opportunity.
A senior Japanese defense official complained that neither South Korea nor the United States warned Tokyo about Pyongyang's last-minute preparations to conduct the nuclear test, the Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported Wednesday.
"They got blind-sided," said the defense policy expert who asked not to be named.
"No one is really paying attention to Japan," said Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. In a Tuesday telephone interview, he voiced concern about the prospect that Tokyo might develop a nuclear arsenal of its own if the United States fails to offer sufficient security assurances.
The senior defense official noted that administration officials over the past few weeks had publicly acknowledged North Korean intent to conduct the test, but said that "precise timing, of course, is impossible to predict" (see GSN, May 4).
The official did not address the issue of Washington's prior consultations with its Asian allies behind the scenes. However, a last-minute public warning was likely not warranted, the official said.
"In general, we try not to respond to every gesture that the North Koreans make," the senior official told GSN. "We just don't want to play the game where we respond to every movement of material and trucks or something, with a never-ending series of declarations and demarches that they ignore anyway."
Note: This article was updated on 06/02/2009 to correct a word in the final sentence.