Nuclear technology is no longer state of the art, not even for a country as isolated as North Korea --for this reason, Hibbs believes that nuclear proliferation has to be countered through addressing the complex political factors underlying it.

We touched on a broad range of topics related to the possible spread of nuclear arms. In part one, we discuss North Korea's uranium enrichment program, whether the A.Q. Khan network is still in existence, and why export controls alone can't prevent a determined country from obtaining nuclear technology.





Can North Korea increase its nuclear capacities to the point where the types of confrontations that we're seeing now become even more fraught?

There are two different ways of making nuclear weapons. One is uranium, and one is the implosion route, which is normally associated with plutonium.

The plutonium route -- implosion technology -- may be more difficult to produce. But North Korea has been at this for a while, and regardless of which of the two technologies may be favored or which has certain advantages, the bottom line is that for whatever reason the North Korean regime is doing this -- whether it's because there's an internal power struggle, or they're trying to get the U.S. and South Korean "sunshine" diplomats to pay them off, or whether they're trying to test the new South Korean government -- who knows. We don't really know the reason. But right now, the North Koreans are pulling out all the stops they can to escalate the situation. And they're trying to project as many threats as possible....

We know that there's an inventory of plutonium in the country. We don't exactly know how much there is, but we assume there's enough for a number of explosive devices. The assumption has been that as of 2010 at the latest, they were getting into uranium enrichment, and that they would be making bombs with uranium...

Now what we're hearing [with the announced re-opening of the Yongbyon facility] is that plutonium is back on the agenda. They're pulling that lever, but the bottom line is that we know that they've got two options and that they're trying to do both of them. That's not by any means a surprise. There's an indication that they're expressing, at least at scientific levels, some interest in thermonuclear technology.

North Korea, which has had a nuclear program for many years, is not at the beginning of this process. They have been at it for a long period of time. Contrary to the views that some people are recently expressing, this is not a race to the bomb. This is a country that has been in the business of doing nuclear research for almost half a century.

The politics of this are more important than the technology, because eventually North Korea is going to have all of the eggs in its basket, and it's just going to be a matter of whether their leadership decides it wants to deploy these assets or not. Fundamentally, the politics are trumping the technology.