WASHINGTONThe twin nuclear crises the Obama administration faces in Asia and the Middle East underline a harsh reality for U.S. strategists: North Korea's weapons capabilities are far more advanced than Iran's.Pyongyang, as a result of decades of covert atomic work, is close to mastering the technology to mount one of its estimated dozen nuclear warheads atop medium-range missiles that are capable of striking U.S. allies South Korea and Japan, American officials and international nuclear experts believe.
Iran, by comparison, has no atomic bombs in its military arsenal, nor the ability to deliver them, say U.S. and United Nations experts. Iran says its nuclear program is strictly for civilian purposes, although the Obama administration has charged Tehran with trying to develop nuclear weapons.
"By many estimates, North Korea will have the ability to deliver nuclear weapons using long-range ballistic missiles to distant targets within four to five years," said Evans Revere, a former senior State Department official who follows Korean affairs at the Brookings Institution. "This will drastically change the security environment in Asia."
North Korea also is able to produce dozens more nuclear bombs by employing two separate programs to create weapons-grade fuelplutonium and highly enriched uranium, said U.S. and U.N. officials.
Iran has so far only developed uranium-enrichment technology. The U.N. is concerned, though, that Tehran could begin separating plutonium from spent fuel produced by a nuclear reactor Iran is building in Arak.
This gap between North Korea and Iran, which is widely recognized in Washington, is exposing what many Western diplomats and security analysts believe has been the U.S.'s muted response to Pyongyang's nuclear advances in recent years, as compared with Iran's.
The Obama administration has been reluctant to engage diplomatically with North Korea because Pyongyang has backed out of previous disarmament deals and because it wants to avoid a direct confrontation with North Korean ally China, officials say. Congress has also been more aggressive against Iran, partly in response to Israel's concerns.
But these officials said the U.S. position risked signaling to Tehran that Washington will take a tougher line on countries that are developing nuclear weapons capabilities, rather than those that have actually acquired them.
"Everything we fear Iran will do in the future, North Korea largely already has done," said David Asher, who led efforts in theGeorge W. Bushadministration to counter Pyongyang's financial and proliferation networks. "If we applied one-third of the pressure on North Korea that we do on Iran, there would be huge strategic consequences."
However, in recent months, the White House has changed tack by enacting new economic sanctions against North Korea, both bilaterally and through the U.N., in response to nuclear and long-range missiles tests it conducted since December.
In recent days, the Pentagon has also deployed advanced bombers and stealth fighter jets over the Korean peninsula in a bid to dissuade Pyongyang from threats to strike U.S., South Korean and allied targets in Asia.
U.S. defense officials said these deployments were a signal to North Korean leader Kim Jong Eun that Washington maintained the ability to deliver its nuclear weapons in Asia, even though there are none stationed in South Korea.
"It is very important, for the sake of stability, to send a clear message on our capabilities and our clear commitment to extended deterrence," said a senior U.S. defense official.
Still, the Obama administration has displayed much greater and more sustained diplomatic and military muscle in combating Iran's nuclear program since taking office in 2009, said these diplomats and analysts.
During this time, the U.S. has led a global coalition to choke off Iran's finances, including orchestrating a growing ban on Tehran's oil exports. PresidentBarack Obamahas also threatened to use military force against Iran if it doesn't curb its nuclear program through diplomacy.
Neither the Obama nor Bush administrations have ever overtly threatened to strike North Korea's nuclear facilities, despite Pyongyang's testing of three nuclear devices since 2006.
The Bush administration, during its final years in office, reduced U.S. leverage over Pyongyang as it pursued disarmament talks with it, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The State Department removed North Korea from the U.S.'s list of state sponsors of terrorism during Mr. Bush's second term and released funds frozen in Chinese banks that were believed to be controlled by Mr. Kim's family.
North Korea's nuclear program began in the 1960s, roughly a decade before Iran's, and it benefited from major technical and financial support from the former Soviet Union.
Moscow trained North Korean scientists and helped build the Yongbyon nuclear reactor complex north of Pyongyang, which produced the plutonium used in building the North's atomic bombs. The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, also believes that China and Pakistan have shared nuclear technologies with Pyongyang.
Iran has collaborated with Russian and Pakistani scientists in developing Tehran's nuclear program, according to IAEA experts, but not on the scale of North Korea.
Tehran maintains a cooperation agreement with the IAEA, which allows the U.N. agency to regularly visit Iran's nuclear-fuel production sites. North Korea, conversely, expelled IAEA inspectors from the Yongbyon complex in 2002. At that time, U.S. officials believe, Pyongyang significantly increased its extraction of plutonium from the facility and began expanding a uranium-enrichment program.
North Korea has also been at the forefront among developing countries in building medium- and long-range missile systems. U.S. and IAEA officials believe that North Korean missile components and designs have been sold to a wide range of Middle East governments, including Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen.
U.S. and Israeli officials are now concerned Pyongyang could share with Tehran the technologies it has developed to miniaturize a nuclear warhead and affix it to a medium-range missile.
The IAEA has said it believed Tehran was experimenting with developing these technologies in the early 2000s, but may have suspended the work in 2003. Last September, however, Iran and North Korea signed a scientific cooperation accord in Tehran, which is raising fears about possible cooperation in nuclear arms.
"Any 'scientific cooperation' between Iran and North Korea is potentially a source of real concern to us, and we'll have to follow it closely," said a senior U.S. official.
By The Wall Street Journal
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