A new Washington Post report says U.S. intel officials have concluded that North Korea has constructed a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, accelerating the country’s move towards becoming a fully operational nuclear power.
From the Post:
The findings are likely to deepen concerns about an evolving North Korean military threat that appears to be advancing far more rapidly than many experts had predicted. U.S. officials last month concluded that Pyongyang is also outpacing expectations in its effort to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking cities on the American mainland.
While more than a decade has passed since North Korea’s first nuclear detonation, many analysts believed it would be years before the country’s weapons scientists could design a compact warhead that could be delivered by missile to distant targets. But the new assessment, a summary document dated July 28, concludes that this critical milestone has already been reached.
July 28 is also, by the way, the date that North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that experts believed was capable of hitting the west coast of the United States. They’re estimated to have up to 60 nuclear weapons at this point, according to the Post. Earlier on Tuesday, the New York Times reported that North Korea threatened “physical action” in response to the latest U.N.-backed sanctions, whose member states DPRK referred to as “packs of wolves.”
In a case of horrifying timing, Breitbart and other pro-Trump media have recently been running attacks on Trump’s relatively sane national security advisor H.R. McMaster, a so-called “globalist” who has reportedly had tension with the president and is feuding with Steve Bannon. According to one expert interviewed by the Post, the bigger threat is that the White House, rather than North Korea, will initiate a deadly chain of events.
“Overselling is particularly dangerous,” said [Siegfried] Hecker, who visited North Korea seven times between 2004 and 2010 and met with key leaders of the country’s weapons programs. “Some like to depict Kim as being crazy — a madman — and that makes the public believe that the guy is undeterrable. He’s not crazy and he’s not suicidal. And he’s not even unpredictable.”
“The real threat,” Hecker said, “is we’re going to stumble into a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula.”
It would be great, therefore, if rhetoric from the White House coul—
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