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N.Korea Could Test Long-Range Missile Any Time - U.S.

Dec 17, 3:05 PM (ET)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea could flight test at any time a ballistic missile potentially capable of reaching parts of the United States with a nuclear-weapon-sized payload, the State Department's top arms control official said on Friday.

Making the case for President Bush's drive to build a missile shield days after a failed test of the system, Stephen Rademaker, assistant secretary of state for arms control, said North Korea was pushing plans to develop its ocean-leaping, multiple-stage Taepo Dong 2 missile.

"This missile could be flight tested at any time," he told a conference in a congressional office building sponsored by the American Foreign Policy Council, a private research group.

A critic of the U.S. missile-defense plans, however, accused the Bush administration of playing up a North Korean threat "whether or not one exists" as a way to sell the shield program for which it plans to spend more than $50 billion over the next five years.

"They're not going to let technical problems or a less-severe threat prevent them from pursuing" missile defense, said Jon Wolfsthal, an expert on deadly weapons at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Central Intelligence Agency has said that the Taepo-2 "may" be ready for testing. The report was in an unclassified report to Congress that covered developments to the end of last year.

North Korea's Aug. 31, 1998, test over Japan of an earlier-generation Taepo Dong 1 helped set the stage for Bush's drive to field a missile shield as soon as technologically feasible. Pyongyang has stuck to a voluntary moratorium on flight tests since the launch.

Bush ordered the Pentagon two years ago to have the basic elements of a missile defense system on alert by the end of this month. The Pentagon's prime contractor for the ground-based system is Boeing Co..

However, technical problems -- including a flight test aborted this week when the interceptor shut itself off in its silo -- appear to have delayed a declaration that the system was ready to go on alert.

The setup is initially designed to counter ballistic missiles that could be fired from North Korea and tipped with chemical, nuclear or germ warheads.

If North Korea were to use a third stage on its Taepo Dong 2 booster rocket, as did in the 1998 Taepo Dong 1 test, "such a three-stage missile could deliver a several hundred kilogram payload up to 15,000 kilometers (9,300 miles)," enough to hit parts of the United States, Rademaker said.

Such a missile also had sufficient range to hit all of Europe, he said.

Experts generally says a nuclear warhead built by a new nuclear state would weigh about 1,100 pounds (500 kg). Some suspect the North may have made progress on miniaturization with clandestine help from A.Q. Khan, a Pakistani scientist who secretly headed a global nuclear network.

Rademaker said the North was "nearly self-sufficient" in developing and producing ballistic missiles.

Iran, the other member of what Bush branded "axis of evil" states along with pre-war Iraq and North Korea, also is working on space-launch capabilities along with its suspected nuclear weapons program, he said.

Iranian intercontinental-range ballistic missile systems could be ready for flight-testing in the "middle to latter-part of the decade," he said.

http://reuters.myway.com/article/20041217/2004-12-17T200534Z_01_N17264117_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-ARMS-MISSILE-KOREA-DC.html