Fuzzy math

This week, North Korea Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon said that his country has turned the plutonium from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into nuclear weapons. In April, South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck had said that would be enough for eight bombs. In Thursday's debate, John Kerry claimed "there are four to seven nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea." Other numbers are tossed around.

There is one small problem: They may not have any at all.

North Korea may have only a single nuclear weapon and there is no proof that the reclusive country has actually produced any, the head of a group trying to disarm North Korea's atomic program said in an interview Friday. ...

"When you get into this discussion about the numbers, it quickly sort of becomes people seeking facts," said Charles Kartman, the executive director of the New York-based Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, known as KEDO, told The Associated Press.

"They feel comfortable with the numbers because they imply facts. These aren't facts. They're worst-casing all sorts of stuff. There may be zero. The number of proven weapons is zero," Kartman told The Associated Press.

KEDO was created as part of a deal under which North Korea would be provided with nuclear technology from which it's difficult to obtain weapons-grade plutonium in exchange for its halting of enrichment programs. It's stalled over charges that Pyongyang has a clandestine uranium-enrichment program, but hasn't been abandoned.

The claim for North Korean nukes has been based on the belief that

in the mid-1990s that North Korea might have reprocessed some plutonium from its Russian-supplied reactor complex at Yongbyon, because the International Atomic Energy Agency found traces of it in a chemical analysis of samples from the site.

"There is a maximum amount of plutonium that could have been reprocessed, and if that is true, then depending on the state of North Korean technology, it would have been sufficient for one, or at most, two (weapons)," Kartman said.

What this comes down to is that no one really knows if North Korea has nuclear weapons or is it just blowing smoke, and if it does, how many and how sophisticated are they. It also means, sadly, that if it does have nukes, it might be because the belief that it had them lead the US (and others) to act in a way that prompted the North Koreans to develop them. A version of the self-fulfilling prophecy and another demonstration of the failure of "do as we say, not as we do" as policy.

Footnote: It should be noted that last April, the New York Times reported (in a now-archived article) that

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who sold nuclear technology around the world, has told his interrogators that during a trip to North Korea five years ago he was taken to a secret underground nuclear plant and shown what he described as three nuclear devices....

However, the article also noted that it was unknown if Dr. Khan had the opportunity or expertise to check the Koreans' claim.