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Tuesday
Aug082017

North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say

As reported by the Washington Post, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the North Korean regime has succeeded in crossing another threshold toward full nuclear weapons status. It is the miniaturization of nuclear warheads, to fit in the nose cone of an ICBM. The North Korean regime also recently conducted successful tests of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles with ranges capable of reaching much of the United States, according to some estimates. The North Korean regime also already has more nuclear weapons than previously thought, up to 60. This news comes two days after the 72nd commemoration of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, and one day before the 72nd commemoration of the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The last hurdle remaining, the article reports, is an ICBM nose cone capable of withstanding the heat of re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, which U.S. intelligence agencies estimate will be accomplished by late next year.

The article quotes Siegfried Hecker, "director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the last known U.S. official to personally inspect North Korea’s nuclear facilities...who visited North Korea seven times between 2004 and 2010 and met with key leaders of the country’s weapons programs."

“The real threat,” Hecker said, “is we’re going to stumble into a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula.”

The article reports "The options said to be under discussion [within the Trump administration] ranged from new multilateral negotiations to reintroducing U.S. battlefield nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula, officials familiar with internal discussions said." (emphasis added)

As recently reported by Mark Hertsgaard in The Nation, we need to get Trump's finger off the nuclear button! (Take action -- urge your U.S. Senators and U.S. Representative to support the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017, introduced in January by Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California.) And, we need to abolish nuclear weapons, before they abolish us! See Beyond Nuclear's Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Proliferation website sections for more info.