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As Kim wooed Trump with 'love letters,' he kept building his nuclear capability, intelligence shows
Source: Washington Post
As Kim wooed Trump with ‘love letters,’ he kept building his nuclear capability, intelligence shows
By Joby Warrick and Simon Denyer
9/30/2020, 7:18:39 p.m.
In a secret letter to President Trump in December 2018, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un likened the two leaders’ budding friendship to a Hollywood romance. Future meetings with “Your Excellency,” Kim wrote to Trump, would be “reminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film.”
Yet even as he penned the words, Kim was busy creating an illusion of a different kind. At six of the country’s missile bases, trucks hauled rock from underground construction sites as workers dug a maze of new tunnels and bunkers, allowing North Korea to move weapons around like peas in a shell game. Southeast of the capital, meanwhile, new buildings sprouted across an industrial complex that was processing uranium for as many as 15 new bombs, according to current and former U.S. and South Korean officials, as well as a report by a United Nations panel of experts.
The new work reflects a continuation of a pattern observed by analysts since the first summit between Trump and Kim in 2018. While North Korea has refrained from carrying out provocative tests of its most advanced weapon systems, it never stopped working on them, U.S. intelligence officials said. Indeed, new evidence suggests that Kim took advantage of the lull by improving his ability to hide his most powerful weapons and shield them from future attacks.
The pause in testing has produced benefits for both leaders, despite the lack of tangible progress toward the stated goal of the United States in any accord: a denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in exchange for ending crippling economic sanctions against the North. Kim’s show of restraint has allowed Trump to claim a partial foreign policy success, even as administration officials acknowledge that North Korea has not eliminated a single bomb or dismantled any of its missile factories.
For Kim’s part, the easing of tensions has opened new routes for circumventing sanctions while his factories quietly churn out more nuclear warheads and bigger missiles to carry them, current and former U.S. intelligence analysts and nuclear experts say.
-snip-
By Joby Warrick and Simon Denyer
9/30/2020, 7:18:39 p.m.
In a secret letter to President Trump in December 2018, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un likened the two leaders’ budding friendship to a Hollywood romance. Future meetings with “Your Excellency,” Kim wrote to Trump, would be “reminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film.”
Yet even as he penned the words, Kim was busy creating an illusion of a different kind. At six of the country’s missile bases, trucks hauled rock from underground construction sites as workers dug a maze of new tunnels and bunkers, allowing North Korea to move weapons around like peas in a shell game. Southeast of the capital, meanwhile, new buildings sprouted across an industrial complex that was processing uranium for as many as 15 new bombs, according to current and former U.S. and South Korean officials, as well as a report by a United Nations panel of experts.
The new work reflects a continuation of a pattern observed by analysts since the first summit between Trump and Kim in 2018. While North Korea has refrained from carrying out provocative tests of its most advanced weapon systems, it never stopped working on them, U.S. intelligence officials said. Indeed, new evidence suggests that Kim took advantage of the lull by improving his ability to hide his most powerful weapons and shield them from future attacks.
The pause in testing has produced benefits for both leaders, despite the lack of tangible progress toward the stated goal of the United States in any accord: a denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in exchange for ending crippling economic sanctions against the North. Kim’s show of restraint has allowed Trump to claim a partial foreign policy success, even as administration officials acknowledge that North Korea has not eliminated a single bomb or dismantled any of its missile factories.
For Kim’s part, the easing of tensions has opened new routes for circumventing sanctions while his factories quietly churn out more nuclear warheads and bigger missiles to carry them, current and former U.S. intelligence analysts and nuclear experts say.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-kim-north-korea-nuclear/2020/09/30/2b7305c8-032b-11eb-b7ed-141dd88560ea_story.html