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Noko prolif accelerating – better intelligence k2 solve

WASHINGTON — North Korea has an operational road-mobile missile that could carry nuclear weapons to the United States, according to the commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command. The KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missile was first paraded in North Korea in 2012. Many analysts suspected at the time that the missiles on display were mock-ups and doubted that the country had actually developed the weapon. But on Tuesday, Adm. Bill Gortney, the head of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command, told reporters at the Pentagon that he thinks Pyongyang has achieved a breakthrough. “We assess that it’s operational today, and so we practice to go against that,” he said. Gortney said North Korea has not yet tested the missile, and he declined to explain why he thinks the missile is ready to go. The U.S. military does not consider its weapons to be operational until they’ve been tested. The KN-08, if operationally deployed, would be more difficult to defeat than fixed-site missiles because it could potentially be moved around secretly by the North Korean regime to make it more difficult for the U.S. to locate and target preemptively during a crisis. “It’s the relocatable target set that really impedes our ability to find, fix and finish the threat,” a problem which is compounded by the fact that the U.S. military does not have “persistent” intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets over North Korea, Gortney said. North Korea also has the ability to marry the missile with a nuclear warhead, according to the NORAD chief. “Our assessment is that they have the ability to put a nuclear weapon on a KN-08 and shoot it at the [U.S.] homeland,” he said. The U.S. ballistic missile defense system has a spotty test record. Gortney noted the “fits and starts” that it’s experienced, but expressed confidence that it would work in a crisis. The U.S. has 30 ground-based interceptors at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. As the leader of NORAD and NORTHCOM, Gortney would be responsible for launching the interceptors against North Korean missiles if they threatened the homeland. “I own the trigger on this,” he said, “and I have high confidence that it will work against North Korea.”

Prolif’s accelerating- they’ll be a major threat by 2020

Wit 4/10 (Joel, 2015, founder and editor of 38 North, a program of the US-Korea Institute at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in an interview with Srinivas Mazumdaru for DW, “'North Korea could have up to 100 nuclear weapons by 2020',” http://www.dw.com/en/north-korea-could-have-up-to-100-nuclear-weapons-by-2020/a-18374679)//RTF

Despite international sanctions, North Korea is on the verge of rapidly increasing its nuclear arsenal over the next five years, adding to regional concerns, as Joel Wit, founder of US think tank 38 North, tells DW. The delivery systems a country possesses determine its ability to use its weapons - be it conventional, nuclear or biological - in the event of a war. The systems range from hi-tech options such as ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and combat aircraft to low-technology ways of using artillery and ground-based vehicles. Despite efforts to curb the spread of these systems, many countries around the world continue to acquire them. And those already in possession of these technologies, such as North Korea, appear steadfast to improve and expand their arsenals. Pyongyang's nuclear program has been a key bone of contention the communist regime and the international community, particularly after the isolated East Asian nation conducted nuclear tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013. While the country's current inventory is well-developed, the regime has "bigger ambitions and is seriously pursuing the deployment of more capable, longer-range, more survivable weapons," concludes a recently released report by 38 North, a program of the US-Korea Institute at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University. Titled "The Future of North Korean Nuclear Delivery Systems," the report dwells into North Korea's current missile program and offers various scenarios for the country's future nuclear delivery systems capabilities. Nordkorea testet Schiff-Abwehrrakete North Korea is believed to have the world's most secretive regime In a DW interview, Joel Wit, founder and editor of 38 North as well as the project lead, says that North Korea could be a significant threat to the region by 2020 even without any new missile and nuclear weapons tests. He stresses that international sanctions against North Korea have so far been totally unsuccessful in terms of stopping the country from importing nuclear technology. DW: According to your findings, how would you assess North Korea's present nuclear arms capabilities? Joel Wit: We estimate that North Korea possesses anywhere between 10-16 nuclear weapons, and that they are able to put these weapons on top of at least medium-range missiles, which are able to hit most targets in Japan and South Korea. North Korea has a small nuclear arsenal, but the most important point we are trying to make in the report is that they could be on the verge of rapid expansion of both their nuclear arsenal and their delivery systems over the next five years. What are the main findings of your report? In terms of nuclear weapons, North Korea would have a stockpile of between 20 and 100 bombs by 2020, depending on several factors such as the amount of resources it pours into its nuclear program and the country's ability to acquire foreign technology. Nordkorea Militärübung Raketen Wit: 'North Korea's missile program is still mainly based on old Soviet technology' But while North Korea has mastered nuclear weapons technology over the past 25 years, developing the delivery systems has proved to be more difficult and remains a significant engineering challenge. For instance, if you look at North Korea's missile program, it is still mainly using old soviet technology. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the country has about 1,000 missiles that can reach targets in the region, and they require no new testing. The bottom line therefore is that North Korea could be a significant threat to the region by 2020 even without any new missile and nuclear weapons tests. Who is supporting North Korea in developing its nuclear delivery systems capabilities? Right now, we believe it's very much an indigenous program. There is no more foreign assistance for North Korea's old liquid-fueled rockets. However, what we find is that some of the newer systems that are appearing are also based on old Russian technology. And it's not quite clear whether North Koreans are able to produce them by themselves or they acquired a these technologies somehow from Russia in the past. Although there is a bit of uncertainty, we think the North has the capabilities to take care of their main basic missiles - the liquid-fuel ones - in their arsenal. What challenges does North Korea's nuclear program currently face? One of the things we are not clear about North Korea's nuclear capabilities is the size of their program to produce highly-enriched uranium. We know it exists but we are not sure how advanced it is. So the issue is how many nuclear plants they have and how much uranium can they produce. And that's one of the factors that influence our projections. In terms of the qualitative capabilities of their nuclear weapons, the main consideration is of course whether they can mount their weapons on top of missiles or not. Although there has recently been some talk about North Korea being able to put weapons on top of intercontinental missiles, we are skeptical about it and believe it requires more testing for the country to acquire that capability. How successful have the current international sanctions been in curbing Pyongyang's nuclear activities? The sanctions have been totally unsuccessful in terms of stopping North Korea from importing nuclear technology. I don't think they have had any impact on Pyongyang's ability to acquire more capabilities. North Koreans have been evading sanctions for decades, and on top of that I would say that the enforcement of these sanctions by the international community has been very lax. What level of threat does the North's nuclear capability pose to the countries in the region? If I was a South Korean or Japanese, I wouldn't want a North Korea that could be armed with a 100 nuclear weapons in the next five years. I would be very concerned about that development, particularly if the relationships in the region remain tense. It’s certainly not a good scenario and could get much worse. What should the international community do to stop or at least slow down North Korea's pursuit to develop more advanced weapons and delivery systems? The problem right now is that everything we are doing is currently not working. We have no diplomacy, and sanctions aren't working at all. I would even go further and say that the recognition of this growing threat is lagging behind the speed at which it is growing. Yongbyon Atomanlage Nordkorea 2008 'It is unclear how many nuclear plants North Korea has and how much uranium they produce' I think we really do need to have a reassessment of what's going on in North Korea, and based on that we need to find a new approach to tackle the issue. The approach is going to require thinking about serious sanctions; making them tougher and actually enforcing them. But it would also need thinking about serious diplomacy to identify peaceful paths to move forward. Unfortunately, I don't believe any of that is going to happen. The US is pretty much done in terms of dealing with North Korea and is consumed with Iran, and I don't think that's going to change.

Ext. Need Better Detection

Status quo detection and verification is insufficient- most intel is guesswork

Thielmann 5/12 (Greg, 2015, Senior Fellow at Arms Control Association, “Understanding the North Korean Nuclear Threat,” http://www.armscontrol.org/files/TAB_05_2015.pdf)//RTF

Intelligence Challenges Regarding North Korean Nuclear and Missile Programs Making accurate political and technical forecasts concerning North Korea has proven to be extremely challenging. The actions of North Korea’s leaders often appear erratic to those who do not follow the arcane politics and history of the ruling Kim dynasty. Moreover, the weapons development track in North Korea sometimes deviates from the course of development elsewhere. Given the lack of U.S. diplomatic, commercial, and cultural contact with North Korea, the hermetically sealed nature of North Korean society, and the concentration of decision-making authority at the top of the North’s dictatorial regime, continuing surprises from the government in Pyongyang should be expected. An assessment of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities starts with some solid information: the amount of plutonium-239 known to have been extracted from the spent fuel of the Yongbyon reactor and reprocessed. Based on this knowledge, experts initially estimated that North Korea had sufficient fissile material for a handful of weapons using a rudimentary nuclear warhead design. Over time, additional variables were added to the equation, including the unknown amount of enriched uranium from recently revealed centrifuges at Yongbyon and possibly from other, covert facilities and the unknown sophistication of North Korean warhead designs, which would affect the amount of fissile material needed for each weapon. On some key questions, the U.S. intelligence community has been frank in describing the limits of its understanding. For example, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper conceded in this year’s worldwide threat assessment statement to Congress that “we do not know the details of Pyongyang’s nuclear doctrine or employment concepts.”3 In other areas, however, the intelligence community has been less forthcoming about its lack of information and certainty, offering only predictions of what “could” happen rather than what is most likely to happen. Such formulations provide ample protection to the analysts against future accusations that they had provided no warning, but inevitably lead to misleading contemporaneous headlines in the press and erroneous interpretations by members of Congress. Open disagreements in characterizing the status of North Korea’s long-range missile program among senior U.S. officials and between U.S. and South Korean officials is revelatory. They could indicate either honest differences in assessing the meaning of commonly shared information or the differing purposes of the intelligence assessment. Warning of what could happen uses different assumptions than predicting what is likely to happen; each has a legitimate role. Some U.S. military commanders have stated confidently that North Korea has been able to design miniaturized warheads that can be placed on medium- and short-range missiles. For example, Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the top U.S. military commander in South Korea, said at a Pentagon news conference in October 2014, “I believe that [the North Koreans] have the capability to have miniaturized the [nuclear] device at this point.”4 A Defense Intelligence Agency report in 2013 had assessed with “moderate confidence” that the North had already mastered the technology of building a device small enough to be used in a missile warhead.5 Such statements have been challenged by South Korean intelligence officials or walked back by the leadership of the U.S. intelligence community and senior Pentagon officials. There is, in fact, a significant difference of opinion among experts in what Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, calls “The Great Miniaturization Debate.” Lewis explains that determining whether North Korea can arm a ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead boils down to an assessment of three questions: • Can it make a nuclear weapon small enough? • Can a compact nuclear weapon survive the shock, vibration, and temperature change of ballistic missile flight? • Can the re-entry vehicle survive the heat of reentry? His answer to each is “yeah, probably,” but he concedes that “reasonable people may disagree.”6 Until an actual flight test occurs and perhaps even afterward, the confidence level in such assessments will not be high. In recent months, nongovernmental analysts have described an increasingly alarming situation with regard to North Korea’s nuclear status, particularly concerning the numbers of nuclear warheads that North Korea may be able to deploy. A prominent analysis by Joel Wit and Sun Young Ahn of the US-Korea Institute at SAIS laid out scenarios for minimal, moderate, and rapid growth in North Korea’s nuclear forces (see Table 1). From an existing estimated stockpile of 10 to 16 nuclear weapons (six to eight fashioned from plutonium) capable of being deployed on short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, the authors project growth by 2020 to 20, 50, or 100 warheads, with the latter two paths including nuclear-tipped intermediate-range ballistic missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).7 Although Wit and Ahn assessed that the moderate path was the most likely, most press coverage of their report headlined the high-end projection—100 warheads deployed on a full range of battlefield, theater, and intercontinental weapons, with the longer-range systems carrying a significantly higher yield than the North currently has in its inventory. Recent news reports suggested that Chinese estimates already credit North Korea with 20 nuclear warheads and sufficient weapons-grade uranium-enrichment capacity for doubling the size of its arsenal by next year8—a pace of progress more in line with the rapid-growth scenario in the Wit and Ahn analysis than the majority view among U.S. security experts. The closed-door discussions with U.S. nuclear specialists in February 2015 were reported to include Chinese technical, political, and diplomatic experts on North Korea’s nuclear program, as well as military representatives. Although more-detailed information is needed to reach definitive conclusions about whether such assessments reflect the official views of the Chinese government, the higher number cited is at least intriguing and more noteworthy coming from China’s “reluctant witness” perspective. Siegfried Hecker, who was the U.S. team’s lead expert during the February conversations, acknowledged that estimates of North Korea’s nuclear stockpile by China and the United States involved a great deal of guesswork. Additional evidence of the softness in threat assessments regarding North Korea can be seen in the frequently cryptic or confusing references to North Korean capabilities in unclassified statements of the U.S. intelligence community. For example, Clapper straddled the ICBM deployment timing issue in congressional testimony by explaining that “[w]e assess that North Korea has already taken initial steps toward fielding [the KN-08 ICBM], although the system has not been flight-tested.” He thereby left the impression, at least among non-experts, that a system that has never flown is already being fielded, even though experts realize that, in all other historical examples of ICBM development, operational status would only be achieved years after the system’s first research and development flight test. Some argue in response to such logic that North Korean weapons development timelines are sui generis, noting, for example, that the Nodong medium-range ballistic missile was deployed after only one successful flight test. The weight of evidence, however, appears to be on the side of those who are dubious about the operational capability of North Korea’s road-mobile KN-08 ICBM.9 A prestigious U.S. commission headed by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assessed in 1998 that North Korea (and other states of proliferation concern) would be able to threaten the United States with an ICBM within five years – that is, by 2003. More than a dozen years have come and gone since then with no North Korean flighttest of an ICBM. Although the 1999 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the foreign ballistic missile threat was more careful in its predictions than the Rumsfeld Commission, it judged as “most likely” that the United States would face a North Korean ICBM threat by 2015.10 North Korea’s recent announcement that it had successfully test-fired a ballistic missile from a submerged submarine11 will add new concerns about the nuclear threat the country poses. If confirmed, political reactions in the region and in the United States are likely to prove more dramatic than any actual military gains by North Korea would warrant.

Korea is years away from nuclear capacity — our detection capabilities need to be upgraded for when it occurs.

Sang-hun 15 — Choe Sang-hun, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, B.A. in Economics from Yeungnam University, 2015 (“North Korea Claims it Has Built Small Nuclear Warheads,” New York Times, May 20^th, accessible online at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/world/asia/north-korea-claims-it-has-built-small-nuclear-warheads.html?ref=topics&gwh=31AE2434E90C8F3D553433E9E11563E1&gwt=pay, accessed on 6-23-15)

North Korea said the May 8 test involved successfully launching a strategic missile from a submarine. But some analysts have since questioned the claim, saying that some of the photographs of the episode that North Korea released may have been altered and that the test launch may have been conducted from a submerged barge, rather than a submarine.

Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Tuesday, Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr., vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, voiced similar misgivings.

“They have not gotten as far as their clever video editors and spinmeisters would have us believe,” Admiral Winnefeld said. “They are many years away from developing this capability. But if they are eventually able to do so, it will present a hard-to-detect danger for Japan and South Korea, as well as our service members stationed in the region.”

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