- WASHINGTON (UPI) -- North
Korea's mention of "more powerful" weapons in its statement admitting
to a nuclear weapons program could mean the country thinks it can create
a thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb, scientists told United Press International
Thursday.
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- The North Korean government confirmed the existence of
its uranium-enrichment and weapons development program to U.S. officials
Oct. 2 after being confronted with evidence about it from U.S. intelligence
sources. North Korea, officials said, also ominously warned it had even
"more powerful" weapons.
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- The Bush administration disclosed the news late Wednesday
in a series of apparently orchestrated leaks to selected U.S. media.
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- The ambiguous "more powerful" comment has been
interpreted as a threat of biological or chemical weapons, but other meanings
are possible, said Michael Levi, director of the Federation of American
Scientists' Strategic Security Project.
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- "My gut reaction was that it must refer to thermonuclear
devices, but that could be bluster," Levi told UPI. "Most of
our debates (at the FAS) have turned on what exactly the translation was
... would you use the word 'powerful' to refer to a biological weapon (in
that context)?"
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- In addition to the weapons-grade uranium program, U.S.
and South Korean intelligence agencies suspect North Korea already has
plutonium from its now-inactive Russian reactors.
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- Both elements are needed for a hydrogen fusion bomb,
said Edwin Lyman, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a Washington-based
non-proliferation research and advocacy organization. There also are advanced,
more powerful fission devices that use uranium and plutonium, he told UPI.
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- Unclassified scientific research on thermonuclear devices
reveals a complex, two-stage bomb. A uranium chain reaction starts the
process, compressing a quantity of deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen,
around a "spark plug" of plutonium.
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- The follow-on plutonium detonation heats the compressed
hydrogen to the point of a fusion reaction, the same process that powers
the sun.
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- Thermonuclear weapon yields can reach into the tens of
megatons -- equivalent to millions of tons of the explosive, TNT, and hundreds
of times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
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- A 1 megaton device detonated on the Washington Mall would
destroy every building within approximately three miles. Ordinary buildings
up to six miles away would be flattened.
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- The equations and engineering involved in creating an
H-bomb have taxed the most brilliant scientists in the United States, the
former Soviet Union, Great Britain and France, Lyman said. Hard facts about
the successful designs are very difficult to obtain, he said, so the North
Korean comments sound to him like saber-rattling.
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- "At a minimum, you have to ensure you have a fission
weapon that has a reliable yield ... there's a fairly small window of error
for igniting the thermonuclear blast," Lyman said. "My perception
is that it would be a very big reach to conclude they have a workable design
at this point."
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- If the Bush administration had reason to suspect North
Korea has such an advanced program, its response would have been much more
forceful, Lyman said.
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- Testing is key to thermonuclear designs, Levi said, because
the technology involved is not a straightforward development from fission
weapons. India said it detonated a "boosted" weapon during its
testing standoff with Pakistan in 1998, he said, but available seismic
data suggested a simple fission bomb instead.
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- The challenges to creating a North Korean H-bomb should
not be minimized, however, Levi said. The end result might not need to
be turned into a missile warhead. A truck-mounted device -- therefore somewhat
less complex -- could be driven to the edge of the Korean demilitarized
zone and still get the job done, he said.
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- As troubling as the H-bomb idea is, a more troubling
question is how North Korea could have managed to create and operate uranium-enrichment
facilities clandestinely under the international scrutiny that followed
the closure of the Russian reactors, Lyman said. Such an achievement casts
serious doubts on efforts to limit worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons,
he added.
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