Someone’s leaking again. Bill Gertz writes for The Washington Times (emphasis added):
Recent U.S. intelligence analyses of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs were flawed and the lack of clarity on the issue hampered U.S. diplomatic efforts to avert the underground blast detected Sunday, according to Bush administration officials.
Some recent secret reports stated that Pyongyang did not have nuclear arms and until recently was bluffing about plans for a test, according to officials who have read the classified assessments.
The analyses in question included a National Intelligence Estimate a consensus report of all U.S. spy agencies produced several months ago and at least two other classified reports on North Korea produced by senior officials within the office of the Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte.
And these classified reports were leaked by … ?
The officials said there were as many as 10 failures related to intelligence reporting on North Korean missile tests and the suspected nuclear test that harmed administration efforts to deal with the issue.
Like they didn’t know North Korea was processing plutonium? It’s been in the news, dudes. You can find out about it by googling. I realize that having plutonium is not the same thing as having a bomb, but if somebody’s got enriched plutonium, I understand that making the bomb itself is the relatively easy part. On top of that, it has been widely believed for years that North Korea built one or two nuclear bombs back in the 1970s.
I can’t believe even Bush Administration diplomats are so stupid they wouldn’t have been working under the assumption North Korea could have nuclear weapons, or might get them at any time, no matter what some NIE said.
And if they were genuinely surprised by the recent alleged nuclear test, is there something they would have done differently had they known? Like, maybe, take North Korea talks more seriously?
Even more astonishing, White House mouthpiece John Hinderaker admits his masters leaked the reports to get back at the CIA. Get this:
We’ve reported many times on the four-year-long war the CIA has carried on against the Bush administration. Today the administration returned the favor by telling Bill Gertz of the Washington Times that the intelligence community failed to foresee the recent North Korean nuclear test.
Of course, this isn’t really about North Korea. It’s about making excuses for George W. Bush’s sorry ass and setting up a scapegoat to take the blame. Oh, and selectively leaking intelligence for political purposes. Same old, same old.
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I think the explanation for some of this is disinformation. I think the Bush maladmin. has been controlling all news and all leaks – everything – and deliberately of course making sure none of it reflects reality. At least as far as MSM reports and leaks. The only peeks inside are from Hersh, Woodward, and of course the blogs. My two cents.
Hey lets not forget we(the US) caught our old pal in Pakistan, you know,general whats-his name selling stuff to NK….hmmm what did we ever do about that,besides declaring Pakistan was a good partner in the war on terror? Did we even stop the goods from reaching NK?Did we punish general whats-his name?Has george learned his name now or did he make up some cute little nick name for him?Perhaps bush needs to look into general whats-his -names soul?
And on to nutty Kim…how many times did he ask the US to enter into a non aggression treaty?IF bush had gotten off his high horse and done that perhaps nutty kim wouldn’t have gotten the idea that his country needed nukes to be safe from the likes of us.
Like it or not ,bush has sent the rest of the world one loud and clear message…if your country is weak and without a few nukes we can occupy your country at will… the only way to keep a bully at arms length is to make the bully fear you…nutty kim needs to appear nutty as a fruit cake to the rest of the world in order to be respected… it seems to be the only thing we seem to understand… and we(the US) are amazed by his insanity because he is willing to step closer to the edge than our own nut case.
To me bush looks like a pussy who just met his match.I am only sad the rest of the world doesn’t see the grave threat the two nut cases are to the world.IF the world was smart we would lock them both up before we are all dealing with the fallout.IF so much as one hair on one head is harmed over this situation it will be 100% the fault of bush and his failure to see the damage his shitty attitude has caused.I will pay for a uhaul and the gas if that human piece of waste will just go back to texas …I would even help them pack….I have never wanted anyone to get the fuck out of MY house so badly…I am just waiting for the rest of the country to join me.
Grandma was right…You speak the truth, you shame the devil.
Bush is driven by his lies, and there truly is no rest for the wicked.
Go Georgie, go!.. Run,run,run, as fast as you can..but you can’t catch me, said the ginger bread man.. YES..on the ropes, skedaddling for the bunker. Go Georgie go.
I try to avoid the stupidity that is Hindernutter, but I do get a kick out his supposed “CIA at war against Bush” story line.
Do you think he knows a single person at CIA? One single person, one desk jockey, one agent, one operative, one guy who always has to clean the coffee pot because no one else will do it.
Somehow, I just doubt it.
“Do you suppose he (Hinderaker) knows a single person at the CIA”?
Well…He’s all chummy with G. Gordon Liddy…
And that’s enough for a WingNut…
Maha, you’ve got most of this right but just for the record, as I understand it, the plutonium bomb, once you have the nuclear material, is much more difficult to make than the uranium bomb. The uranium bomb, once you go through the tedious process of enrichment and get enough material, merely requires a closed cannon to slam the parts together. The plutonium bomb requires an implosion device and is much more difficult to machine and build. The difficulty may explain the low yields the North Koreans got. And it ought to raise the question of how good North Korea’s other plutonium bombs are, not that I would want to test the proposition.
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Actually, the construction of a plutonium bomb is the hard part, as it fissions so rapidly it is extraordinarily difficult to get it to stay together long enough to get a significant event. It was quite an achievement in 1945. Purifying the plutonium is relatively easy, since it is chemically different from the Uranium matrix and the process is a chemical one. Not trivial, but not rocket science, either. A perfectly timed series of precisely spherical explosions is required to generate the critical mass in a tiny fraction of a second – the Nagasaki bomg was called Fat Man for a reason.
Uranium, on the other hand, is easy to build into a bomb. The Hiroshima bomb was fascinatingly simple – basically a ball with a hole in it of just subcritical mass, and a gun with a Uranium bullet aimed at the hole (the Hiroshima bomb was called Tall Boy for that reason). Assembly can be relatively slow because the neutron increase was slow enough to allow the unit to collide before it disintegrated. Uranium PROCESSING is frustratingly difficult (which is why two different processes were tried and only one bomb was produced in 1945 after years of effort) – U235 (bomb material) is chemically the same as U238 (depleted Uranium). They are also very close to the same density so that thousands of steps are required to centrifuge them apart, taking HUGE amounts of electricity, a gigantic facility, and a very long time.
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