[Quietly, the Pentagon has been refining longstanding contingency plans, from intercepting missile parts at sea to attempting, if Mr. Trump should decide to do it, to destroy a missile on the launchpad, before it is tested. But it is more likely that the United States would first try a variant of the effort developed during the Obama administration to sabotage the launches with cyber and electronic warfare techniques, and with a steady flow of bad parts.]
By David E. Sanger
WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies
have shortened their estimate — to one year — of how long it is likely to take
North Korea to put the finishing touches on a missile that can reach the
continental United States, according to several administration officials
briefed on the new assessment.
Until a few weeks ago, the official estimate
was that it would take roughly four years, give or take 12 months, for North
Korea to develop a missile that could carry a nuclear weapon small enough to
fit into the missile’s warhead and capable of surviving the stresses of
re-entry and deliver it to the United States.
But the realities of the past few months,
especially a July 4 test that crossed a major threshold — if just barely — has
forced intelligence experts to conclude that their estimates have been too
conservative. In the test this month, a missile carried a warhead 1,700 miles
into space, and returned it at high speed in a sharp parabola.
If the trajectory was flattened out, the
missile could strike Alaska. That forced government experts, reflexively
cautious after overestimating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction 14 years ago,
back to the drawing board.
Behind the new assessment, officials said,
was a growing recognition that they underestimated the determination of Kim
Jung-un, North Korea’s leader, to race ahead with a weapon that could reach
American soil, even if it is crudely engineered and inaccurate.
General Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, put the best case forward last week when testifying
before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The most recent test, he said,
stopped short of demonstrating that North Korea possesses “the capacity to
strike the United States with any degree of accuracy or reasonable confidence
of success.”
But that statement went far beyond what most
Pentagon officials had been allowed to say in public before the most recent
test. And it reflects a growing view, from the Defense Intelligence Agency to
the C.I.A., that at this point Mr. Kim’s missile engineers, while still
refining the technology, have cleared most of the major hurdles.
It is unclear how, if at all, that will
change the calculus for President Trump. He has vowed to dispense with the
Obama-era strategy of “strategic patience” toward North Korea. American
military officials have been asked to come up with new potential strategies,
from stepped-up economic pressure to increased cyber attacks on the missile
testing regimes. But there is a lurking sense, one senior intelligence official
said last week at the Aspen Security Forum, that at this point the best the
United States can do is delay the day when North Korea demonstrates it can
reach beyond Alaska and Hawaii.
“It a big long supply chair to build this
thing out,” the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo, said
at the security conference, the first public reference to a long-running covert
program to undermine the parts and technologies that flow into North Korea. “As
for the regime, I am hopeful we will find a way to separate it” from its
missile and nuclear capabilities.
But the essence of the new assessment, which
was first reported by the Washington Post, is that Washington has no more time.
If the 2018 estimate is right, North Korea will have a crude capability to
reach the continental United States before the nation’s missile defenses are
upgraded.
Quietly, the Pentagon has been refining
longstanding contingency plans, from intercepting missile parts at sea to
attempting, if Mr. Trump should decide to do it, to destroy a missile on the
launchpad, before it is tested. But it is more likely that the United States
would first try a variant of the effort developed during the Obama
administration to sabotage the launches with cyber and electronic warfare
techniques, and with a steady flow of bad parts.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence issued a statement from Scott Bray, the national
intelligence manager for East Asia, that walked to the edge of acknowledging
that judgments are shifting.
“North Korea’s recent test of an
intercontinental range ballistic missile — which was not a surprise to the
Intelligence Community — is one of the milestones that we have expected would
help refine our timeline and judgments on the threats that Kim Jong Un poses to
the continental United States,” Mr. Bray wrote.
“This test, and its impact on our
assessments, highlight the threat that North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic
missile programs pose to the United States, to our allies in the region, and to
the whole world.”
The steady frequency of the North Korean
missile tests, using a new solid fuel technology, came as a surprise to many
intelligence experts, providing a different lesson than the one that emerged
from Saddam Hussein’s weapons-of-mass destruction program in Iraq.
In the Iraq case, the intelligence agencies
overestimated Saddam Hussein’s ability to reconstitute what was once a healthy
nuclear weapons program. In the North Korean case, one senior intelligence
official noted last week, the speed and sophistication of the program have been
consistently underestimated — much as it was with the Soviet Union 70 years
ago, and China more than 50 years ago.