US intelligence not certain NK has nuclear arms

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States cannot say for certain that North Korea possesses any nuclear weapons but believes Pyongyang has continued to produce plutonium from its 5-megawatt Yongbyon reactor, top intelligence officials said on Tuesday.

In a marked departure from precedent, U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte declined to estimate the number of nuclear devices North Korea might have assembled, despite repeated questioning by Democrats at a hearing by the Senate Committee on Armed Services.

"I've been very reluctant to get into numbers," Negroponte told the panel's annual public hearing on worldwide threats.

"We assess that they probably have nuclear weapons, as they claim that they do. But we don't know for a fact that they've got such weapons ... So to then say with precision the number they've got, I think, would be difficult to do with our level of knowledge," he added.

"But there's no question that there's a potential there for a number of weapons," Negroponte said.

The acknowledgment that U.S. intelligence has been unable to confirm North Korea's status as a declared nuclear power came as Pyongyang said it has successfully made nuclear weapons with its own technology and cash.

The U.S. government said in a declassified intelligence estimate in 2002 that it believed North Korea possessed one and possibly two nuclear weapons. Pyongyang officially announced that it had nuclear arms a year ago, and private analysts since then have said its arsenal could contain up to 12 nuclear devices.

But North Korea has not produced tangible evidence of nuclear arms by testing a weapon.

SOURCE

 

Declassified government documents have been declared to have zero credibilty. Haven't you heard?

Don't believe anything you read in this article, I posted it so it must have come from a looney leftist conspiracy site instead of Reuters.

 

I don't know if they have them or not. I've always believed that they did and they were a bigger threat to our security than Saddam Hussein ever was. But we're there now and the questions of exactly why still haven't gone away. North Korea still has enough scare potential to make headlines and take them away from Iraq, while the Pentagon squares away it's new propaganda campaign against Iran. That just got kicked up a notch.

BAM!

It's now being "revealed' that Iran has EMP weapons that will knock us back into the "stone age".

Care for a second helping of cream of mushroom cloud on the horizon soup to go with the canned propaganda?