North Korea Submarine Missile Allows Covert Nuclear Strike on US - By Ari Yashar - http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/195013#.VUjocpt8POV
Regime tests nuclear-capable missile from underwater for first time, as officials blame Obama for allowing 'tragedy.'
In a worrying step showing North Korea's rapidly expanding nuclear strike capabilities, the Communist regime recently held a test of a new submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), the first time it has launched a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead from underwater.
According to US defense officials cited by the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday, the test took place on April 22 from an underwater test platform near the coastal city of Sinpo in the southeast of the country, and tested what the US is calling a KN-11 missile.
The test appears to have been successful, and is the third KN-11 test showing the high-priority of the nuclear missile program for North Korea. Previous tests in January and last October were from a sea-based platform not underwater and a land-based platform.
The KN-11 joins the KN-08 mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) as being part of a varied North Korean missile arsenal on platforms that would be hard for the US to detect, and consequently allow a strike that would be difficult to shoot down.
Admiral Bill Gortney, Commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and US Northern Command, admitted last month that North Korea could hit the continental US with a nuclear strike. That admission accompanied the announcement that NORAD is reopening its nuclear-EMP-proof Cheyenne Mountain bunker, apparently amid renewed concerns of an EMP attack by which a nuclear weapon would be detonated over the US, knocking out all of its electronic devices, and thereby rendering it defenseless to secondary nuclear strikes.
The latest launch test also comes after Chinese experts warned the US last month that American estimates are wrong and North Korea actually has 20 nuclear weapons, with that arsenal to double next year thanks to the regime's higher than anticipated advanced enrichment capabilities.
Nuclear strikes the US won't see coming
Admiral Cecil D. Haney, commander of the Strategic Command, confirmed the SLBM launch test in comments to the Senate on March 19, reports the Washington Free Beacon. The program is in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.
Regarding the UN, it was reported last month that US President Barack Obama hid intel from the UN about North Korea transferring rocket components needed to create a nuclear missile to Iran even during the nuclear talks, to try and prevent the UN from acting on the information with increased sanctions.
Former US Defense Intelligence Agency official Bruce Bechtol, Jr. told the paper that North Korea's SLBM program is meant to give it the ability to strike the US, and to not have the strike be detected in advance.
"With an SLBM they get both," said Bechtol. "The submarine can get the platform to launch the missile within range of the continental United States, Alaska, or Hawaii. Thus, once operational, this immediately brings key nodes in the United States within range of what would likely be a nuclear armed missile."
He noted that once the KN-11 and mobile KN-08 "systems go operational, it potentially gives North Korea a dual threat for attacking the United States with nuclear or chemical weapons - a threat generated from difficult to detect mobile platforms on both land and sea."
Obama is bringing the US to "tragedy"
A number of American officials responded sharply to the KN-11 test, placing the blame squarely on Obama's shoulders.
"This missile, along with the KN-08, happened on Obama's watch and nothing has been done," one US intelligence official told the Washington Free Beacon.
Former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton added his criticism, saying, "by utterly ignoring North Korea's growing missile threats, Obama has allowed the threat of rogue state proliferators to fall out of the center of the national political debate."
"This is a potential tragedy for the country," Bolton warned.
Air Force Lt. Gen. (ret.) Thomas McInerney said that the KN-08 and KN-11 programs constitute "threats to the continental United States and have been developed under the Obama administration's leadership."
"Leading from behind is a failed strategy as evidenced by this very dangerous strategic threat to the continental United States of nuclear attack by a very unstable North Korean government," said McInerney.
The general also spoke about Obama's admission that the nuclear deal being formed with Iran will allow it to obtain a nuclear weapon in under 15 years if it doesn't breach conditions and obtain it sooner, noting that the deal "puts the United States in the most dangerous threat of nuclear attack since the height of the Cold War but from multiple threats - North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran."
Opponents of the nuclear deal being formulated with Iran ahead of a June 30 deadline have warned it follows in the footsteps of the failed deal sealed by then-President Bill Clinton with North Korea in 1994.
Despite the deal, North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006, just over ten years after the agreement.
Focus on North Korea to stop Iran - By John Bolton - http://nypost.com/2015/04/30/focus-on-north-korea-to-stop-iran/
Recent Chinese estimates of North Korea's nuclear-weapons capabilities should have shattered our complacency about Pyongyang's proliferation threat.
Moreover, given the ongoing negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, Tehran's longstanding, close working relationship with Pyongyang should also have rung alarm bells around the world.
Instead, the revelation that the North might already possess 20 nuclear warheads, and could double that in 2016, quickly sank from view.
While both the media and US intelligence agencies face enormous obstacles in covering North Korea, China's estimates of Pyongyang's nuclear infrastructure, especially its uranium-enrichment capacity, nonetheless compel our attention.
Beijing's judgment may be imperfect, but its enormous presence and influence in the North make it far likelier to be accurate than US, Japanese or South Korean estimates.
North Korea's sizeable nuclear arsenal imperils East Asia - particularly, Tokyo and Seoul - but also the United States. Its ballistic-missile program is rapidly nearing the capability of reaching our West Coast.
And the North's deep poverty gives it every incentive to sell virtually any weapons or technology to anyone with hard currency, including terrorists or other rogue states.
Besides being one of the planet's poorest, most isolated, most repressed countries, the North has been under comprehensive American sanctions since the Korean War and extensive UN sanctions since 2006, when it resumed ballistic-missile launches and first tested a nuclear device.
None of this prevented Pyongyang from progressing to the threatening levels China now assesses.
This alone should warn us that the less-comprehensive, less well-enforced sanctions against Iran could never compel it to renounce its 30-year quest for deliverable nuclear weapons. If North Korea, perennially on the brink of starvation, can become a nuclear power, Iran can easily match its fellow rogue state.
China's new estimates should thereby compel a critical re-evaluation of the talks among Iran and the Security Council's permanent members (and Germany).
A deal blocking Iran from proceeding quickly to nuclear weapons, whatever its specific terms, rests on two critical assumptions:
First, the United States and others must have essentially full knowledge about the current status of Iran's nuclear and ballistic-missile programs.
Without such a "baseline" assessment, we cannot possibly judge the likely efficacy of a counter-proliferation agreement. If you don't know where you start, you can hardly judge the sufficiency of the measures agreed to.
Second, following the baseline assessment, Iran must either be fully transparent about its nuclear and missile programs, or a combination of international inspectors and our intelligence agencies must be able to provide the facts necessary to detect and respond to Iranian violations.
Neither of these fundamental preconditions exists in the April 2 "framework." This defect alone should be central to the debate if a "final" deal is ever reached.
China's new estimates underscore another key deficiency in the "framework" with Iran: It fails to consider Iran's facilitators beyond its borders.
Dealings with other rogue states (or private efforts like A.Q. Khan's former bazaar of uranium-enrichment technology and weapons designs) increase the difficulty of monitoring and stopping Tehran from becoming a nuclear state.
Tehran and Pyongyang have cooperated on ballistic missiles since at least 1998, when a missile launched from North Korea landed in the Pacific east of Japan.
The outraged Japanese public reaction in effect forced North Korea to declare a moratorium on launch testing.
Pyongyang turned then (if not before) to Tehran to cooperate on missile development, not surprisingly since both countries relied on the same Soviet-era Scud missile technology. Cooperation continued even after the North resumed launch testing in 2006.
The Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by Israel in 2007 was a clone of North Korea's Yongbyon reactor and was being constructed under its supervision.
Given Syria's limited economy, Iran may well have largely financed the project, for obvious reasons: What better place for Pyongyang and Tehran to hide illicit nuclear activities than outside their own territories?
Subsequently, numerous reports have emerged of Iranian and North Korean scientists exchanging visits and potentially valuable information.
What if Pyongyang is already hosting an extensive Iranian-enrichment program, deeply buried somewhere in its half of the peninsula? What if some of the estimated 20 warheads are actually Iran's property, having been manufactured and now stored far from Tehran to avoid detection?
East Asian experts have long looked through a stovepipe at North Korea, and Middle East experts gaze through their own stovepipe at Iran.
Broader proliferation concerns should have caused wider inquiries earlier, but China's ominous new estimates now require it. No Iran deal is acceptable until the North Korean connection is fully exposed and understood.
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