This post is from May 2005. Facts and links may have changed since. See more from that month

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North Korea's Nuclear Weapons May Weigh 650-750 KG

The Defense Intelligence Agency concludes “an early-generation warhead weighing 650-750 kg is the best Pyongyang could achieve.”

The Defense Intelligence Agency—in A Primer on the Future Threat, The Decades Ahead: 1999-2020 (SECRET/NO FORN) from July 1999—concludes North Korea’s nuclear weapons will weigh no less than 650-750 kg:

In the near term, it is unlikely that the North Korean nuclear weapons program can achieve nuclear yield from a 100 kg device. An early-generation warhead weighing 650-750 kg is the best Pyongyang could achieve.

Such a warhead would, presumably, require a test. The CIA concluded tests are unnecessary for simple fission devices.

Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes, (USA-Ret.) authored the report while Director of DIA from 1996-1999.

FAIR’s Seth Ackerman notes Hughes was “widely believed” to be a key source of classified material leaked to the Washington Times’ Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough.

Excerpts from the report—including this one—were published in Scarborough’s Rumsfeld’s War. I may post a .pdf of the document if I have time later this week.

Jeffrey Lewis

Writing on ACW 2004–2026

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis is the founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk.com. He is the Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. His also a non-resident affiliate at Stanford's Center for Security and International Cooperation and a Contributing Editor to Survival.

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