By Ankit Panda
April 23, 2015
A report in the Wall Street Journal released on Wednesday notes that “China’s top nuclear experts” have upped their threat assessments of North Korea’s nuclear weapons production. Per the report, which is based off comments made by those experts at a “closed-door meeting with U.S. nuclear specialists,” these Chinese experts perceived North Korea to pose a greater nuclear threat than even most contemporary U.S. assessments. The report comes not long after the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies released a new report suggesting that North Korea could, in an extreme scenario, possess up to 100 nuclear warheads by 2020 (if you missed it, Shannon Tiezzi and I spoke to Joel Wit, one of the authors of that report, on The Diplomat’s podcast).
The Journal’s report suggest that the latest Chinese estimates place North Korea’s active nuclear arsenal as of April 2015 at 20 warheads. This number is unconfirmed as no one outside of North Korea—not even China, Pyongyang’s erstwhile closest partner—knows the specifics of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Interestingly, the report notes that the Chinese experts believe that North Korea is capable of producing sufficient amounts of weapons-grade uranium to “double its arsenal by next year.”
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