A South Korean soldier stands on a military guard post near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) dividing the two Koreas in the border city of Paju. Source: AFP
THE United States has delayed testing one of its own intercontinental ballistic missiles as some analysts say they believe North Korea can launch nuclear warheads.
A senior defence official has said the Pentagon delayed an intercontinental ballistic missile test in order not to inflame already flash-point tensions with the rogue state.
Scheduled to be launched this week from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the official said Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel decided to put off the long-planned Minuteman 3 test until sometime next month.
The test was not connected to the ongoing U.S.-South Korean military exercises that have been going on in that region and have stoked North Korean anger and fueled an escalation in threatening actions and rhetoric.
North Korea's military warned earlier this week that it was authorized to attack the U.S. using "smaller, lighter and diversified" nuclear weapons.
However, North Korea is generally regarded as being years away from perfecting the technology to back up its bold threats of a pre-emptive strike on the United States.
But a recent string of successful tests has introduced a strong measure of doubt.
On Sunday afternoon it was reported that Japan will order its armed forces to shoot down any North Korean missile headed towards its territory.
Under the order, Aegis destroyers equipped with sea-based interceptor missiles would be deployed in the Sea of Japan so they could intercept a North Korean missile if it appeared likely to land in Japanese territory, Kyodo said.
Meanwhile most foreign diplomats in North Korea appear to have taken the decision to stay put, ignoring a warning by Pyongyang that they should consider evacuating amid the soaring tensions.
Pyongyang had informed embassies it could not guarantee their safety if a conflict broke out as concerns grew that the isolated state was preparing a missile launch.
But most of their governments made it clear overnight that they had no immediate plans to withdraw personnel, and some suggested the advisory was a ruse to fuel growing global anxiety over the current crisis on the Korean peninsula.
A British Foreign Office spokeswoman, commenting on the North's advisory, said: ``We believe they have taken this step as part of their country's rhetoric that the US poses a threat to them.''
Diplomatic family and staff are given final check by North Korean military police before boarding an aircraft to leave the country yesterday.
Western tourists returning from organised tours in Pyongyang - which have continued despite the tensions - said the situation on the ground appeared calm, with life going on as normal.
"We're glad to be back but we didn't feel frightened when we were there,'' said Tina Krabbe, from Denmark, arriving in Beijing after five days in North Korea.
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The embassy warning on Saturday coincided with reports North Korea had loaded two intermediate-range missiles on mobile launchers and hidden them in underground facilities near its east coast.
"The North is apparently intent on firing the missiles without prior warning,'' South Korean news agency Yonhap quoted a senior South Korean government official as saying.
North Koreans go about their business in Pyongyang oblivious to their leader's threats of war. Picture: Brown James
They were reported to be untested Musudan missiles which are believed to have a range of around 3000 kilometres that could theoretically be pushed to 4000 kilometres with a light payload.
That would cover any target in South Korea and Japan, and possibly even reach US military bases located on the Pacific island of Guam.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said yesterday Washington "would not be surprised'' by a missile test, which would fit the North's "current pattern of bellicose, unhelpful and unconstructive rhetoric and actions''.
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No one can tell with any certainty how much technological progress North Korea has made, aside from perhaps a few people close to its secretive leadership. And it is highly unlikely that Pyongyang would launch such an attack, because the retaliation would be devastating.
In this Feb. 22, 2008 file image from television North Korean workers operate equipment at North Korea's main nuclear reactor in Nyongbyon, also known as Yongbyon.
The North's third nuclear test on February 12, which prompted the toughest UN Security Council sanctions yet against Pyongyang, is presumed to have advanced its ability to miniaturise a nuclear device. And experts say it's easier to design a nuclear warhead that works on a shorter-range missile than one for an intercontinental missile that could target the US.
The assessment of David Albright at the Institute for Science and International Security think tank is that North Korea has the capability to mount a warhead on its Rodong missile, which has a range of 1280 kilometers and could hit South Korea and most of Japan. But he cautioned in his analysis, published after the latest nuclear test, that it is an uncertain estimate, and the warhead's reliability remains unclear.
Albright contends that the experience of Pakistan could serve as precedent. Pakistan bought the Rodong from North Korea after its first flight test in 1993, then adapted and produced it for its own use. Pakistan, which conducted its first nuclear test in 1998, is said to have taken less than 10 years to miniaturize a warhead before that test, Albright said.
North Korea also obtained technology from the trafficking network of A.Q. Khan, a disgraced pioneer of Pakistan's nuclear program, acquiring centrifuges for enriching uranium. According to the Congressional Research Service, Khan may also have supplied a Chinese-origin nuclear weapon design he provided to Libya and Iran, which could have helped the North in developing a warhead for a ballistic missile.
But Siegfried Hecker at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, who has visited North Korea seven times and been granted unusual access to its nuclear facilities, is skeptical the North has advanced that far in miniaturisation of a nuclear device.
"Nobody outside of a small elite in North Korea knows - and even they don't know for sure," he said in an e-mailed response to questions from The Associated Press. "I agree that we cannot rule it out for one of their shorter-range missiles, but we simply don't know."
South Korean anti-aircraft armoured vehicles move over a temporary bridge during a river-crossing military drill in Hwacheon near the border with North Korea.
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"Thanks to A.Q. Khan, they almost certainly have designs for such a device that could fit on some of their short or medium-range missiles," said Hecker, who last visited the North in November 2010. "But it is a long way from having a design and having confidence that you can put a warhead on a missile and have it survive the thermal and mechanical stresses during launch and along its entire trajectory."
The differing opinions underscore a fundamental problem in assessing a country as isolated as North Korea, particularly its weapons programs: Solid proof is hard to come by.
For example, the international community remains largely in the dark about the latest underground nuclear test. Although it caused a magnitude 5.1 tremor, no gases escaped, and experts say there was no way to evaluate whether a plutonium or uranium device was detonated. That information would help reveal whether North Korea has managed to produce highly enriched uranium, giving it a new source of fissile material, and help determine the type and sophistication of the North's warhead design.
The guessing game about the North's nuclear weapons program dates back decades. Albright says that in the early 1990s, the CIA estimated that North Korea had a "first-generation" design for a plutonium device that was likely to be deployed on the Nodong missile - although it's not clear what information that estimate was based on.
This picture taken by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency on March 31, 2013 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un attending the plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea in Pyongyang.
"Given that 20 years has passed since the deployment of the Rodong, an assessment that North Korea successfully developed a warhead able to be delivered by that missile is reasonable," Albright wrote.
According to Nick Hansen, a retired intelligence expert who closely monitors developments in the North's weapons programs, the Rodong missile was first flight-tested in 1993. Pakistan claims to have re-engineered the missile and successfully tested it, although doubts apparently persist about its reliability.
Whether North Korea has also figured out how to wed the missile with a nuclear warhead has major ramifications not just for South Korea and Japan, but for the US itself, which counts those nations as its principal allies in Asia and retains 80,000 troops in the two countries.
US intelligence appears to have vacillated in its assessments of North Korea's capabilities.
In April 2005, Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that North Korea had the capability to arm a missile with a nuclear device. Pentagon officials, however, later backtracked.
According to the Congressional Research Service, a report from the same intelligence agency to Congress in August 2007 said that "North Korea has short and medium-range missiles that could be fitted with nuclear weapons, but we do not know whether it has in fact done so."
In this March 11, 2013 file photo released by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and distributed by the Korea News Service, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves at military officers after inspecting the Wolnae Islet Defense Detachment, North Korea, near the western sea border with South Korea.
In an interview in Germany, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. does not know whether North Korea has "weaponised" its nuclear capability.
Still, Washington is taking North Korea's nuclear threats seriously.
In December, North Korea launched a long-range rocket that could potentially hit the continental US According to South Korean officials, North Korea has moved at least one missile with "considerable range" to its east coast - possibly the untested Musudan missile, believed to have a range of 3000 - 4000 kilometers.
This week, the US said two of the Navy's missile-defence ships were positioned closer to the Korean peninsula, and a land-based system is being deployed for the Pacific territory of Guam. The Pentagon last month announced longer-term plans to beef up its US-based missile defences.
South Korea is separated from North Korea and its huge standing army by a heavily militarized frontier, and the countries remain in an official state of war, as the Korean War ended in 1953 without a peace treaty. Even without nuclear arms, the North positions enough artillery within range of Seoul to devastate large parts of the capital before the much-better-equipped US and South Korea could fully respond.
And Japan has been starkly aware of the threat since North Korea's 1998 test of the medium-range Taepodong missile that overflew its territory.
Yet in the latest standoff, much of the international attention has been on the North's potential threat to the US, a more distant prospect than its capabilities to strike its own neighbours. Experts say the North could hit South Korea with chemical weapons, and might also be able to use a Scud missile to carry a nuclear warhead.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, acknowledges the North might be able to put a warhead on a Rodong missile, but he sees it as unlikely. He says the North's nuclear threats are less worthy of attention than the prospects of a miscalculation leading to a conventional war.
"North Korea understands that a serious attack on South Korea or other US interests is going to be met with overwhelming force," he said. "It would be near suicidal for the regime."
- With AP, AFP
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