[While North Korea blew up the entrances to its major underground testing site at Punggye-ri in May, it never allowed in inspectors, as promised, to determine whether the facility had actually been destroyed. Commercial satellite photographs suggest the buildings containing the control rooms and computers used to trigger and study the explosions were carefully mothballed.]
By David E. Sanger and William J. Broad
 |
President Trump and Kim
Jong-un, the North Korean leader, ended their
summit meeting last month in Hanoi, Vietnam,
without a deal.
Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
|
WASHINGTON —
President Trump was forced to publicly acknowledge this past week what American
intelligence officials said they had long been telling the White House: Even
during eight months of blossoming diplomacy, Kim Jong-un, the North Korean
leader, was steadily adding to his weapons arsenal and nuclear infrastructure.
Three
times, Mr. Trump told reporters that he would be “very disappointed” if North
Korea was preparing to launch a space rocketthat intelligence
officials believe could help Mr. Kim perfect the means to heave a nuclear
warhead across the ocean. Satellite imagery taken Friday, and analyzed by
the Beyond Parallel program of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, shows that the North has “continued
preparations” on the launching pad at Sohae consistent with readying for “the
delivery of a rocket.”
And in the time
between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim’s first meeting, in
Singapore in June, and their second in Hanoi, intelligence estimates suggest
that North Korea produced enough uranium and plutonium to fuel a half-dozen new
nuclear warheads.
The evidence that
North Korea was moving ahead with its weapons program was clear, according to
American intelligence officials familiar with the briefings provided to Mr.
Trump. But the president sought to soften it in public to avoid imperiling
negotiations, the officials said.
At a news
conference late last month in Hanoi, Mr. Trump was still in that
mode, suggesting the evidence that North Korea was adding to its ability was
ambiguous.
“Some people are
saying that and some people aren’t,” he said.
But for an
administration that regularly acknowledges or dismisses intelligence findings
to fit the moment, North Korea has served as a comeuppance.
Mr. Trump’s aides
have been forced to back away from his now
famous tweet, issued soon after the Singapore meeting, that
“there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” As long as the threat
remains, they now say, so will American-led sanctions against Pyongyang.
On Thursday, a
senior administration official told reporters that the United States remained
open to continuing discussions with North Korea. But the official asserted that
sanctions would not be lifted until all the threats were removed — which he
defined as the North’s entire nuclear program, complex of road-mobile missiles
and chemical and biological weapons programs.
That is a far
broader demand than the Trump administration has previously detailed in public,
and was at the core of the collapse of the discussions in Hanoi.
Mr. Kim had offered
to close an aging nuclear plant at Yongbyon in exchange for the lifting of some
of the toughest sanctions imposed on North Korea. To his surprise, Mr. Kim was
told that the United States would not lift all sanctions until the North surrendered
its entire weapons program.
By all
accounts, Mr. Kim believed Mr. Trump was desperate for a deal and would accept
a more gradual approach — a partial disarmament leading to partial sanctions
relief. Unable to bridge the gap, they walked away, though Mr. Trump insisted
they agreed to continue talking. No further negotiations have been scheduled.
North Korea, for its
part, is using its continued production of nuclear material to pressure Mr.
Trump — making clear its ability to pose a threat will only grow unless the
United States eases its demands.
“For all the talk,
nothing has really changed,” said Victor Cha, whom Mr. Trump considered
appointing as American ambassador to South Korea. “They are playing the same
old game of putting pressure on the U.S.”
The White House and
State Department say that is not the case. The continued moratorium on nuclear
and missile tests, officials said, has slowed Mr. Kim’s progress and kept him
from demonstrating that North Korea could launch a warhead that could hit an
American city.
Some
independent analysts agree with the Trump administration’s rationale, but worry
the moratorium may be coming to an end.
North Korea’s
satellite launching site at Sohae, on the Yellow Sea, offers a case study in
the deep ambiguity of the dismantlement and denuclearization claims by both
sides.
The site is
important because the North has test-fired powerful rocket engines there on a
giant experiment stand and, at the nearby launching pad, successfully cast two
satellites into space. The United States has declared that space launches
violate the commitment that Mr. Kim made to Mr. Trump in Singapore, and later
to President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, to suspend all missile and nuclear
tests.
Modern and
comfortable, with a high observation station, the site represents the jewel of
North Korea’s rocket agenda. Analysts say the
engine test stand played a major role in developing the fiery thrust for the
North’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, whose repeated launchings in 2017
terrified the world.
In June, after the
summit meeting in Singapore, Mr. Trump declared that Mr. Kim had told him the
North was “already destroying” the sprawling site. “That’s a big thing,” he
told reporters. “The site is going to be destroyed very soon.”
Challenged by
reporters about the North’s past record of broken promises, Mr. Trump added:
“Honestly, I think he’s going to do these things. I may be wrong. I mean, I may
stand before you in six months and say, ‘Hey, I was wrong.’”
“I don’t know that
I’ll ever admit that,” he said with a smile, “but I’ll find some kind of an
excuse.”
That enthusiasm
proved premature. For the next eight months, analysts poring over satellite
images of the densely wooded site at Sohae found little evidence of
dismantlement. No major structures were changed, destroyed or disassembled.
Instead, the images
showed the opposite: evidence that North Korea was completing work on an
extensive building complex next to the launching pad at Sohae. Rather than
disassemble the site, as Mr. Kim had promised, it was expanding.
“We all watched
it go up and kept wondering, ‘What is it?’” recalled Jenny Town, a senior
official at 38 North, a research
project and website of the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank, which tracks
political and technical developments in North Korea.
They are still
wondering. No one is certain about the purpose of the structure — or if it has
an intent other than to stoke fear in the United States.
This past week, 38
North and Beyond Parallel reported that reconstruction at the Sohae site had
greatly accelerated.
“Based on commercial
satellite imagery, efforts to rebuild these structures started sometime between
February 16 and March 2, 2019,” 38 North said in its report on
Tuesday.
The summit meeting
in Hanoi began on Feb. 27 — suggesting the construction was intended to give
Mr. Kim some leverage in his talks with Mr. Trump.
As of Friday,
administration officials were telling allies they still did not know if North Korea
planned to resume missile launches at Sohae. But Mr. Trump no longer denounces
news reports of expanded missile bases or revived test sites as “fake news,’’
as he did before the meeting in Hanoi.
In late January, the
president even called in the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, and
the director of the C.I.A., Gina Haspel, to demand they pull back recent public declarations that
North Korea was not likely to ever give up its entire weapons arsenal and
production facilities.
Two days later, Mr.
Trump said the problem lay not in the intelligence officials’ testimony but
in the news coverage about it . One senior official later said the deflection was “all about
avoiding criticism of Kim.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity
because the president’s meeting with the intelligence chiefs was intended to be
private.
Ms. Town said the
satellite site expansion and rebuilding at Sohae reminded her of a similar
episode at the Yongbyon nuclear research center, the main known site for the
processing of fuel for nuclear weapons.
Last year, North
Korea finished building a large facility across from Yongbyon’s experimental
light water reactor. Analysts believe the reactor could double the
North’s supply of weapons-grade plutonium, producing more fuel for its nuclear
arsenal.
“Why do that if it’s
on the bargaining table?” Ms. Town said of the construction at Yongbyon, which
Mr. Kim had offered to close if the United States agreed to lift sanctions.
“There are a few of these cases where it could be part of a hedging strategy.”
Then there are the
headquarters at Punggye-ri’s mountainous atomic test site — a mile-high peak full
of tunnels where North Korea has set off its nuclear detonations.
In November, 38 North analysts reported that,
contrary to reports of the site’s destruction and abandonment, the two largest
buildings at Punggye-ri’s command center remained intact, as did nearby support
facilities for personnel and security forces.
The
lack of dismantlement, the analysts concluded, suggested that the site “may
only be mothballed, with reactivation possible.”
David
E. Sanger reported from Washington, and William J. Broad from New York.
