We've been frew this a dozen times. I don't have any weapons of mass destwuction, OK Hans Brix?

[Tiger in Spain 0]

Scientist: N. Korea Could Fuel 9 Nuclear Weapons

(CBS/AP) WASHINGTON An American nuclear scientist who toured North Korea this month said Wednesday he believes the North has enough fuel for as many as nine nuclear weapons and the capacity to make about one bomb's worth of fuel a year.

Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory who met with chief North Korean nuclear scientists during his Oct. 31-Nov. 4 visit, said that while he learned no technical details about Pyongyang's Oct. 9 nuclear test, officials indicated the test was "fully successful."

He said that he and the small group of former U.S. officials who made the trip noticed a palpable sense of national pride about the test among the North Koreans they met.

Hecker, who based his observations on meetings with the director of the North's five-megawatt Yongbyon nuclear facility and with nuclear specialists in China, said the North Korean nuclear test was most likely "at least partially successful," but the country probably was "still a long way from having a missile-capable nuclear design."

Shortly after the test, U.S. officials confirmed that North Korea had tested a nuclear device, noting an explosion smaller than a kiloton, or the force produced by 1,000 tons (907 metric tons) of TNT. That was smaller than many experts had expected.

U.S. intelligence also concluded that the North Korean device probably used plutonium, as opposed to uranium. Hecker said the Yongbyon director told him the test was a plutonium bomb.

Hecker said he believed from his meetings that construction on a much larger nuclear reactor, which would increase the North's nuclear production tenfold, "seems to have been pushed down the road for a number of technical reasons."

He said the smaller reactor, while not very good for producing electricity, "is very good for producing bomb-grade plutonium."

That reactor is operating currently with restrictions because of "some technical limitations," but it has been producing about a bomb's worth of plutonium a year and is likely to produce at most that amount over the next couple of years, he said.

The United States knows very little about the North's nuclear stockpile or its nuclear strategy, Hecker said.

It appeared to him, he said, that the officials the group met with had given very little thought to strategy or to an appreciation of the safety and security responsibilities and risks associated with being a nuclear weapons power.

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[CCTAU 3,345]

Since we weren't 100% right about the billions of WMDs in Iraq (the few found could still kill tens of thousands) we should not take the chance of being wrong here. If we just ignore it, it will go away.

Maybe the dims could come to some agreement with NK. Wait, they already tried that.....