North Korea tries to play the heavy

[unixronin]

The BBC reports that the North Korean government in Pyongyang delivered a warning to an unofficial team from the United States visiting the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, telling the US to make a deal quickly or North Korea will spend the interim developing nuclear weapons.  The article goes on to say that North Korea is already "likely to have one or two nuclear weapons and may be trying to develop more."  A member of the team was shown an empty holding pond which he was told had formerly contained 8,000 spent fuel rods, which were asserted to have been reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium.

Comments

[caged-admin.livejournal.com]

Given our miserable failure in accurately estimating Iraq's prewar (pick one) nuke capabilities, I see two possibilities. First is that they already have the nukes. They'd be crazy not to make them, if there's no way we can find out about it. Second is they can't, for whatever reason, and they're bluffing. I'm tipping slightly in favor of the second. Why show some unofficial delegation of yahoos water with nothing in it when you can just as easily show them fuel rods or processed plutonium?

Heck, why not show them a lump of papier-mache with black spraypaint and ClearCoat?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Granted, there's no telling how much of their threat is bluff, but that doesn't change their making the threat. New nuclear powers usually tend to announce themselves by blowing a huge hole in something or other, and I haven't heard anything about us picking up any Korean nuclear tests, so .....

Then again, if they only have one or two, they may not want to waste one on a test. I recall Little Boy was dropped without being tested first, because we only had enough plutonium in 1945 to build one.