Consider it a North Korean welcome for the next US president.
Kim Jong Un may fire an intermediate-range ballistic missile Tuesday to send a “strong message” to President Obama’s successor that the hermit kingdom will not abandon its nuclear and long-range missile development programs, despite international condemnation and sanctions.
Military officials in South Korea say they’re on high alert amid the threat of a launch, Yonhap News Agency reported.
“We are closely watching every move by the North Korean military at its Punggye-ri nuclear test site and other possible missile-launching sites,” an official from Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff told reporters in a briefing. “The military is fully prepared to respond to any provocative acts by the North.”
North Korea’s Musudan missiles have an estimated range of roughly 2,175 miles, which would allow the country to target and reach the US territory of Guam in the western Pacific, where US and South Korean forces have stationed military assets in case tensions in the region escalate.
National Intelligence Director James Clapper said last month that persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program is likely a “lost cause.” The US already operates on a “worst-case” assumption that Pyongyang could potentially launch a missile with a nuclear weapon on it that could strike Alaska or Hawaii.
Experts estimate the missile could be operational by 2020, when North Korea could have as many as 100 nuclear weapons, up from the 13 to 21 it now has, according to the Associated Press. North Korea, which has conducted five nuclear tests, may already have the capability to miniaturize a warhead to be used on a short-range missile.
Clapper, speaking at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York last month, said negotiating a cap on North Korea’s nuclear program is likely America’s best hope for corralling it.
North Korea, thanks to ramped-up uranium enrichment and its stockpile of plutonium, will possess enough material for roughly 20 nuclear bombs by the end of this year, weapons experts announced in a report in September.
Jeffrey Lewis of the California-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies told Reuters that North Korea had an unconstrained source of fissile material, both plutonium from its Yongbyon reactor and highly enriched uranium from at least one and probably two sites.
“The primary constraint on its program is gone,” Lewis said.