U.S. spy agencies: North Korea is working on new missiles
North Korea appears to be building
new ballistic missiles despite recent warming ties with the Trump
administration, media reports say.
Unnamed US officials told the
Washington Post that spy satellites had spotted continuing activity at a
site that has produced ballistic missiles.
Reuters news agency quotes an official as saying it is unclear how far the work has gone.
President Donald Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in June.
After the first meeting between sitting leaders from the two
countries, the two men pledged to work towards denuclearisation. Mr
Trump later said North Korea was "no longer a nuclear threat".
But
Mr Trump was criticised at home for making concessions without securing
any firm commitment from Mr Kim to end the nuclear and missile
programmes.
What do the latest reports say?
On
Monday, the Washington Post newspaper quoted officials as saying North
Korea appeared to be building one or two new liquid-fuelled
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at the Sanumdong facility
near the capital, Pyongyang.
The factory is known to have produced the Hwasong-15, the first North Korean ICBM capable of reaching the US.
However,
a US official told news agency Reuters that a liquid-fuelled ICBM
didn't "pose nearly the threat that a solid-fuelled one would because
they take so long to fuel".
Reuters also added that satellite
imaging showed vehicles moving in and out of the facility, but not the
extent of any missile construction.
What are experts saying about this?
These
are not the first reports that North Korea may be continuing its
weapons programme, casting doubt on the real impact of the summit in
Singapore.
Satellite imagery of the Sanumdong facility shows that
the site is "active", Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the Middlebury
Institute of International Studies (MIIS) told the Washington Post.
"[The
facility] is not dead, by any stretch of the imagination," said Mr
Lewis. "We see shipping containers and vehicles coming and going. This
is a facility where they build ICBMs and space-launch vehicles."
To be clear, we could not confirm all parts of the leak. 1/https://t.co/bo2fC5l1Vq— Melissa Hanham (@mhanham) July 31, 2018
Another North Korean expert from MIIS, Melissa Hanham, told the BBC
that the facility had "regular traffic in and out of the building",
adding that this "traffic pattern" on the site stayed "about the same
through the Panmunjom and Singapore meetings".
This indicated that there had not been a complete stop in activity during the summit talks.
She
also noted that large "brightly coloured containers" also showed up in
satellite imagery, saying that "containers similar to these have
appeared during previous ICBM inspections by Mr Kim."
Ms Hanham
added that while that experts at MIIS could not "find a way to confirm
the [intelligence] leak", the information has matched evidence from
satellite imagery.
What was agreed on in the Singapore summit?
North
Korea has carried out a total of six nuclear tests, the most recent of
which took place in September last year. It has in the past two years
quickly advanced its nuclear programme.
But at their landmark
meeting in Singapore, Mr Trump and Mr Kim agreed to work towards the
"complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula".
It's been unclear what both sides mean by "complete
denuclearisation", and no further details have been released about when
or how Pyongyang would renounce its nuclear weapons nor how the process
would be verified.
Experts have also cast doubt on whether Pyongyang has been genuine in its apparent commitment to "denuclearise".
Last week, it appeared North Korea had begun dismantling part of
a key rocket launch site, but according to recent reports based on US
intelligence leaks, Pyongyang might still secretly be continuing its
nuclear weapons programme.
Reports had indicated that North Korea
was upgrading its only official nuclear enrichment site, and was
stepping up enrichment at other secret sites.
Last week, US
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was forced to admit that North Korea was
continuing to produce nuclear fissile material, though he insisted that
"progress is happening".
BBC
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