Doctor Shin Seong-taek of the Korea Defence Institute (KDI) under the Ministry of National Defence (MOND) claimed that North Korea is already in possession of up to ten nuclear warheads in his thesis entitled 'The Threat Of North Korea's Weapons Of Mass Destruction'. Shin said that it is likely Pyongyang extracted 40kg of plutonium from the Yongbyon reactor, enough to build the ten, before IAEA monitoring began in 1992.
He added that North Korean ballistic missiles are difficult to intercept as they travel very fast, for example if a Taepodong-1 is fired from Anjou, north of Pyongyang at Seoul, 251km away, it would arrive in five minutes at mach 12.
Shin noted that 1kg of chemical weapons delivered onto a 1,000 square meter area would deliver a lethal dose to 50% of all living creatures and plants, saying that the North has 1,000 tons of such agents.
(Yoo Young-won, kysu@chosun.com)
