SINGAPORE—The hardest part about disarming North Korea may be knowing where to start.
The regime has the fissile material to make between 16 and 60 nuclear weapons and has likely built 10 to 20, according to U.S. experts. Its army might have 70 missiles, the Congressional Research Service estimates. Much is uncertain; even less is known about the North’s chemical and biological weapons, among them the deadly VX nerve agent.
And it’s all hidden around a mountainous country about the size of Pennsylvania.
Known and suspected sites of North Korea’s nuclear facilities
Mining
Education/training/research/development
Weaponization/testing
Nuclear power reactor
Enrichment/milling/reprocessing/storage
50 miles
50 km
CHINA
Punggye-ri
nuclear test
site
NORTH
KOREA
Sea of Japan
(East Sea)
Pyongyang
Seoul
SOUTH
KOREA
Source: Nuclear Threat Initiative
The U.S. wants the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of North Korea—its ultimate goal in talks between President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore on Tuesday.
In the event of a deal, establishing whether disarmament efforts are successful and complete requires knowing exactly what constitutes Pyongyang’s arsenal in the first place—an exhaustive inventory of missiles, warheads, fissile material, weapons-manufacturing and research facilities.
It’s not an easy task. In previous negotiations in 1994 and in the mid-2000s, Pyongyang adamantly resisted giving such an accounting, a key reason for the collapse of those talks, said Joseph Yun, the State Department’s lead envoy on North Korea until his retirement in February. Having a full catalog of the North’s weaponry is a vital initial step, he said.
Along with its nuclear arms, the North has an array of short-, medium- and intermediate-range missiles developed over decades, and last year launched its first intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking the eastern U.S. It is unclear whether the U.S. will push Pyongyang to give up its missiles—and if so, whether that would encompass shorter range projectiles as well as ICBMs.
The Pentagon said in a report earlier this year that North Korea has dozens of launchers for short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, but that the number of launchers for ICBMs is unknown. Pyongyang has devoted more resources recently to developing mobile launchers that are harder to detect, making estimates tougher.
“The real answer is that these are all estimates, with significant gaps in intelligence,” said Rodger Baker, a senior vice president at geopolitical consulting firm Stratfor. Negotiators will need to test the numbers in any manifest of its arsenal North Korea provides, and then verify those details through inspections, he added.
North Korea’s Nuclear Capabilities
The U.S. is hoping North Korea will commit to dismantling its nuclear program. A look at the country’s arsenal and capabilities:
Estimated nuclear warheads per country*
6,850
Russia
U.S.
6,450
300
France
270
U.K.
215
China
Pakistan
130–140
India
120–130
Israel
80
North Korea
10–20
Estimated stock of fissile material
550 –1,100 pounds
highly enriched uranium
44–88 pounds
plutonium
This is enough to produce
16–32 nuclear weapons
Yield of North Korea’s latest nuclear test,
in kilotons
1,200
Most powerful
bomb in current
U.S. arsenal
140–250
North Korean test
September 2017
15
Hiroshima bomb
Estimated range of Hwasong-15 missile
tested November 2017
Los Angeles
Tokyo
8,100 miles
Hwasong-15 range
*As of May 2018 Sources: Federation of American Scientists (warhead); Siegfried Hecker (fissile material); Center for Strategic and International Studies (yield, range)
Further complicating any verification, U.S. officials have said the U.S. is also pushing for North Korea to give up its biological and chemical-weapons programs in addition to its nuclear arsenal.
The North is known to have used VX in the assassination of Mr. Kim’s half-brother last year, though analysts have few clues on the scale of North Korea’s reserves of such agents.
The regime began producing chemical weapons in the 1980s and is estimated to have between 2,500 and 5,000 tons in stock, according to a white paper published by South Korea’s Defense Ministry. The paper also said North Korea is capable of cultivating lethal biological agents such as anthrax and smallpox that could be turned into weapons.
If North Korea has chemical-weapon artillery shells, as some experts suspect, that could cause problems for South Korea, where suits to protect against chemical attacks are in relatively short supply, said Michael Mazarr, a Northeast Asia security expert at Rand Corp.
At a Tuesday hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Victor Cha, the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the U.S. needs to demand “a complete and fully verifiable declaration of North Korea’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and ballistic-missile programs” as part of the talks.
Hopes that this time will be different rest on Mr. Kim’s claim that the North has completed its nuclear goals and his stated desire to focus on rebuilding the economy.
Pyongyang has gone out of its way to demonstrate what it calls its willingness to help build “a nuclear-free peaceful world.” Last month, the regime invited foreign journalists to watch it blow up its Punggye-ri nuclear test facility.
Even so, independent experts said North Korea could likely restart the site if needed, and may have other underground test sites elsewhere. It could also conduct an atmospheric nuclear test—and has explicitly threatened to do so. Additionally, Mr. Kim has said he had no need for further testing because his nuclear program was complete.
As for North Korea’s stockpile of fissile material, estimates based on scraps of intelligence have allowed arms-control experts to draw a few rough conclusions.
In a report in January, scientists Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris estimated North Korea may have enough fissile material build 30 to 60 nuclear weapons. They expressed doubt, though, that Pyongyang had mastered the ability to deliver a warhead on a long-range missile that could survive atmospheric re-entry.
Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford University nuclear scientist who visited North Korea’s nuclear facilities in 2010, estimated late last year that Pyongyang likely had enough fissile material to make between 16 and 32 nuclear weapons.
David Albright, a physicist and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, said he learned recently of a possible second nuclear-enrichment plant in North Korea, in addition to its known facility at Yongbyon, basing his conclusion on “more than two independent governmental sources.”
The existence of a second facility, in addition to guesswork on how many centrifuges it contained, would dramatically alter estimates on the North’s nuclear stockpile.
Write to Jonathan Cheng at jonathan.cheng@wsj.com
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