'Matter of time' before N.Korea miniaturises nuke: report

Space War ^ | 12/20/2009 | AFP via Space War

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

North Korea will eventually be able to make a nuclear warhead small enough to fit in a missile, a news report said Sunday. Seoul's Yonhap news agency, citing the state-run Korea Institute for Defence Analyses (KIDA), said Pyongyang developing the technology to achieve miniaturisation was inevitable.

"It is believed that North Korea has not completed the technology for the miniaturisation... of nuclear warheads," KIDA said in a report to be issued in January, according to Yonhap.

But KIDA said it is "just a matter of time", noting the country has a high-explosives test site and an estimated 3,000 nuclear scientists and researchers.

The North has 28 state organisations for nuclear development led by the powerful National Defence Commission and the ruling communist party, the KIDA report said, according to Yonhap.

It has conducted nuclear tests twice -- in October, 2006, and in May this year.

KIDA officials were not immediately available for comment.

The North quit six-party nuclear disarmament talks with the United States, China, South Korea, Russia and Japan in April, after the UN Security Council's censure of its long-range rocket launch.

This month US envoy Stephen Bosworth went to Pyongyang for talks -- the first official dialogue since Barack Obama took office -- aimed at persuading the North to return to the six-nation process.

The two sides reached a "common understanding" on the need to resume the six-party talks but set no date.

Experts have said the North's continued nuclear weapons development and missile capability make a dangerous combination.

[JasonC]

Not if they die in the meantime, it isn't...

It is and it always has been a pure matter of will or lack thereof in the west. Everything else is a smokescreen to avoid taking responsibility for it, indulged in by utter cowards.

[FreeAtlanta]

If the creeps running (ruining) that country would spend half the effort in doing productive stuff, their people wouldn't be starving and living in cold poverty.

North and South Korea have been separated at the 38th parallel ever since the Korean War (1950-1953), which has never officially ended. In the ensuing ‘ceasefire’, North Korea developed into a communist dictatorship with a centrally planned economy, while South Korea became a capitalist democracy with a free market economy. Economic hardship in the officially ‘self-reliant’ North has led to mass starvation, while the South has a vibrant economy able to compete with the best of the world. In 1996, the per capita GNP in the North was $920, while it was $11.270 in the South. A 1999 estimate of per capita GNPs put the South’s at 13 times that of the North. More recent figures will probably show an even wider gap.From Strange Maps

Of course, this low use of incandescent bulbs is a communist/progressive/earth worshippers dream society.