Pyongyang’s Submarine Missile Launch U.S. intel Can’t Keep up with North Korean Nuclear Ambition.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/pyongyangs-submarine-missile-launch-1431385367
North Korea’s test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile announced Saturday was not entirely a surprise. The rogue state makes its own version of the 1960s-era Soviet SS-N-6 and uses it as an upper stage in its multistage rockets. Last year a South Korean official confirmed that the North was modifying subs to carry the missile.
In theory this means Pyongyang could mount a surprise nuclear attack, though the missile would require more testing to reliably deliver a warhead. The North could be lying or released doctored photographs, in this case of dictator Kim Jong Un standing aboard a ship and watching as a missile takes flight from beneath the sea.
But if the test was successful—a South Korean official told Reuters Monday that the photos appear authentic—then it again shows the North’s engineering expertise is not to be taken lightly. The Kim regime has developed these threats faster than U.S. intelligence estimates said was possible.
American analysts didn’t predict the North’s launch of a three-stage rocket in 1998, and they believed it would take many more years to develop nuclear weapons, which Pyongyang first tested in 2006. The bipartisan Rumsfeld Commission’s 1998 report on ballistic missile threats accurately assessed the Kim regime’s progress toward an intercontinental ballistic missile, but that judgment was attacked by the intelligence community.
All of this is a reminder that we don’t know how close the North is to putting a miniaturized warhead on a missile capable of hitting the U.S. West Coast. It may take five years or 15. Pyongyang’s scientists often work along multiple tracks, and the regime’s obsession with secrecy and misdirection allows it to fool Western analysts.
Beijing wants the U.S. to pay off the North once again in exchange for false promises that it will halt its weapons programs. That’s why China recently gave American officials its alarming assessment that Pyongyang has up to 20 warheads, with another 20 possible within a year. The Obama Administration recently made overtures to restart talks.
The reality is that arms control with North Korea has failed for more than 20 years. The Clinton Administration failed with its Agreed Framework, the Bush Administration failed with the Six-Party Talks, and the Obama Administration’s overtures have been rejected. If China, the U.S., Japan and South Korea won’t unite behind a strategy of pressure and regime change, then we will eventually confront a North Korea that can threaten the U.S. homeland with a nuclear missile attack.
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