January 28, 2005 ☼ Foreign Affairs
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
The Marmot
Someone was kind enough to email me this piece in Pakistan’s Daily Times citing a piece in Friday’s Seoul Shinmun claiming that North Korea may have obtained a nuclear weapon (or nuclear weapons) from Pakistan. The Korean paper quoted a source in Washington as saying the U.S. has gotten hold of intelligence that North Korea acquired nuclear weapons from outside the country in order to avoid having to conduct very detectable high-explosive tests and to save time in building its nuclear arsenal. The source said the U.S. was in the process of confirming theintelligence.
The source said the the weapon may have been purchased from either somewhere in the former Soviet Union or Pakistan, but U.S. intelligence was placing more weight on Pakistan, from which North Korea obtained uranium enrichment technology. By “nuclear weapon”, it was unclear whether North Korea had obtained a warhead, several warheads, or warheads mounted on missiles. The paper quoted another source familiar with goings on at the U.S. Defense and State departments as saying that not so long ago, he, too, had read a document that North Korea had intended to purchase a nuclear weapon.
From his Hole, the Marmot blogs about things Korean. Thanks to Jodi at the Asia Pages for arranging this guest post.
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