North Korea could flight test at any time a ballistic missile potentially capable of reaching parts of the United States with a nuclear-weapon-sized payload, the State Department's top arms control official said on Friday. Making the case for President Bush's drive to build a missile shield days after a postponed failed test of the system, Stephen Rademaker, assistant secretary of state for arms control, said North Korea was pushing plans to develop its ocean-leaping, multiple-stage Taepo Dong 2 missile. "This missile could be flight tested at any time," he told a conference in a congressional office building sponsored by the American Foreign Policy Council, a private research group. A critic of the U.S. missile-defense plans, however, accused the Bush administration of playing up a North Korean threat "whether or not one exists" as a way to sell the shield program for which it plans to spend more than $50 billion over the next five years.
| Mr. Critic doesn't spend a lot of time reading Rodong Sinmum, does he? |
"They're not going to let technical problems or a less-severe threat prevent them from pursuing" missile defense, said Jon Wolfsthal, an expert on deadly weapons at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
| Wotta expert. Prolly thinks the NKors are just misguided and need a hug. |
The Central Intelligence Agency has said that the Taepo-2 "may" be ready for testing. The report was in an unclassified report to Congress that covered developments to the end of last year. North Korea's Aug. 31, 1998, test over Japan of an earlier-generation Taepo Dong 1 helped set the stage for Bush's drive to field a missile shield as soon as technologically feasible. Pyongyang has stuck to a voluntary moratorium on flight tests since the launch. Bush ordered the Pentagon two years ago to have the basic elements of a missile defense system on alert by the end of this month. The Pentagon's prime contractor for the ground-based system is Boeing Co. However, technical problems -- including a flight test aborted this week when the interceptor shut itself off in its silo -- appear to have delayed a declaration that the system was ready to go on alert. If North Korea were to use a third stage on its Taepo Dong 2 booster rocket, as did in the 1998 Taepo Dong 1 test, "such a three-stage missile could deliver a several hundred kilogram payload up to 15,000 kilometers (9,300 miles)," enough to hit parts of the United States, Rademaker said. Such a missile also had sufficient range to hit all of Europe, he said.
| "And you don't see the sensible Europeans doing anything about this, so where's the threat?" said Wolfsthal, the noted expert. |
|