Is ability to reach U.S. years away? Experts conflicted

VIENNA, Austria — North Korea may have the bomb. But does that put the West Coast of the United States at risk?

Experts disagree about how soon the communist nation can overcome the twin complexities of developing nuclear warheads and perfecting a delivery system that pose a threat to the rest of the world.

Some say it could take years for the country to develop a weapon that would reach the U.S., while others warn North Korea may be well on its way.

North Korea has tested missiles that might be able to reach Japan, China, South Korea and possibly parts of the United States, including the West Coast, but so far those tests have been inconclusive.

As a result, no one is sure if the North can make a weapon small enough to mount on a warhead, or a missile that can deliver an accurate strike.

The U.S. takes the threat seriously enough to rush development of an anti-missile system that includes Boeing interceptors placed in silos at Fort Greely, about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, and at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The system creates what Pentagon brass call a necessary "thin line" defense against hostile nations such as North Korea.

Last month, after the U.S. military successfully shot down a target missile using part of the system, Anthony Cordesman, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it was a step forward, but the military is a long way away from having a working anti-missile system.

"It's important to have the test, but you need a frequency and a level of testing that proves you can do this reliably," Cordesman said. "Is this a milestone of a kind? Yes. Does it prove we have a mature, ready system? No way."

North Korea is believed to have sufficient nuclear material for up to a dozen bombs. Although it was unclear precisely what kind of device was tested Monday, most analysts believe North Korea has not been able to shrink its primitive warhead design small enough to be carried on a missile.

A first-generation nuclear warhead of the type North Korea is suspected of building weighs about 1,000 pounds, according to Charles Ferguson, a nuclear-weapons expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. That is far too heavy to be carried on North Korea's long-range missile, the Taepodong-2, which failed after 40 seconds of flight in a test July 4.

But the mere fact the North apparently has managed to set off an underground nuclear blast is alarming because it moves the volatile nation closer to having atomic arms.

"It's all a bit jaw-dropping in terms of how swiftly the test has been conducted," said Alex Neill, head of the Asian security program at the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense think tank.

He said experts had believed there would be a six- to 12-month gap between the regime's Oct. 3 announcement of its intended test and the reported blast Monday.

Still, a test is just that — an experiment that needs years of development before it turns into a finished product.

The North's nuclear development has remained a mystery since the country kicked out inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and then withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in early 1993.

Still, experts believe North Korea's nuclear and missile technologies lack the sophistication needed to develop warheads and the capacity for delivering them.

Russian and South Korean officials said seismic measurements showed the force of Monday's reported blast was far weaker than the nuclear bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

Rudimentary test bombs can be the size of small trucks, ruling them out as missile payloads. Even the bomb dropped from aircraft on Nagasaki weighed nearly six tons.

"They can deliver it, put it on a cargo ship, drop it from a cargo plane," said Gordon Chang, author of "Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World."

"The point is, can they shrink it to put it on a missile? I don't think they can."

Although some believe the delivery of nuclear bombs may be a sticking point, former U.N. nuclear inspector David Albright suggested Monday that North Korea may be further along the path of weapons development than commonly assumed.

"I would not trust reports saying North Korea" is not capable of delivering nuclear weapons, Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, told CNN.

"We don't know a lot, but North Korea has been at this a long time. We can trace parts of their bomb program back into the 1980s, including the testing of high explosives which are a key component of [a] nuclear explosion."

North Korea shocked the world in 1998 by firing a long-range ballistic missile over Japan into the Pacific Ocean. In July, it test-launched seven more missiles, but a long-range rocket believed capable of reaching the U.S. exploded shortly after takeoff.

Missiles and nuclear bombs are not the only concerns about North Korea's military capacity. The country also is credited with having a million-man army, which U.S. officials believe is granted food rations and other benefits denied most of the population.

But economic sanctions and a near-broke treasury have forced North Korea to do without the fuel, spare parts and replacement weaponry required to keep any military force in good condition. North Korean pilots do not regularly exercise in air maneuvers, according to U.S. officials, and ground combat units rarely exercise in large formations. Much of the country's tank corps consists of 1970s-era T-62 tanks from the Soviet Union.

At the same time, the military capabilities of South Korea have improved dramatically, U.S. officials said, with a total active-duty strength of 686,000. Its army is equipped with tanks with high-tech armor and fire control systems.

Though U.S. forces have been drawn down from Korea in recent years, there are still 24,000 American military personnel stationed in South Korea.

"If [South Korea] were attacked, we are quite capable of defeating an attack and ending hostilities quickly," Army Gen. B.B. Bell, the U.S. military commander in South Korea, said at a news briefing two weeks ago.

Analysts have pointed out that the greater risk to South Korea is not a sustained attack from the North, but a lightning attack that could threaten much of Seoul, the capital, with destruction.

In the event of an attack, U.S. contingency plans call for a rapid intervention by American air power, followed by the reinforcement by ground forces.

Information from Seattle Times archives is included in this report.