Allahpundit
HotAir.com
11/21/2010
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The worry here is that they’re now pursuing a Hiroshima-type bomb based on uranium enriched to 90 percent purity — or, maybe, that they’re thinking of selling that uranium instead to the highest black market bidder.
Those are the basics, but the real bombshell here is the timeline.
The scientist, Siegfried S. Hecker, a Stanford professor who previously directed the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in an interview that he had been “stunned” by the sophistication of the new plant, where he saw “hundreds and hundreds” of centrifuges that had just been installed in a recently gutted building that had housed an aging fuel fabrication center, and that were operated from what he called “an ultra-modern control room.” The North Koreans claimed 2,000 centrifuges were already installed and running, he said.
American officials know that the plant did not exist in April 2009, when the last Americans and international inspectors were thrown out of the country. The speed with which it was built strongly suggests that the impoverished, isolated country, which tested its first nuclear device in 2006, had foreign help and evaded strict new United Nations Security Council sanctions imposed to punish its rejection of international controls…
“The intel agencies dropped the ball,” said Jack Pritchard, a former State Department official who visited North Korea’s main nuclear complex, Yongbyon, a week before Dr. Hecker’s visit and heard North Korean boasts of a new capability…
Do note, the enrichment facility isn’t being built in a bunker inside a mountain. It’s right out in the open, well within view of U.S. spy satellites, housed in a building that’s part of the Yongbyon nuclear complex that America’s been monitoring for years. Not only do they know we’re watching, they clearly wanted us to see it. In which case, unless U.S. intel agencies are irredeemably incompetent — a distinct possibility given their track records in Iraq and Iran — they probably already did know about it and have kept quiet to see how North Korea would play it. One alarming possibility per weapons experts David Albright and Paul Brannan: Could be that the NorKs have other secret enrichment facilities and merely moved the centrifuges from one of those to a public site to get America’s attention, which would help explain the unnerving speed at which they were able to put this whole thing together…
Read the entire article at HotAir.com
