LONDON -- In late autumn I attended a conference on the slopes of Mount Fuji. The focus of the conference was security issues in Northeast Asia, addressing the so-called nuclear threat from North Korea. It was a high-level conference with participants, including a minister of defense, from many countries with a stake in East Asia and the Korean Peninsula.
During the conference, while everyone was getting worked up about the nuclear threat supposedly posed by the leaders of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, I asked a simple question: Was anyone aware of any hard intelligence-based data proving that the DPRK had nuclear weapons, the technological capacity to produce them or the means to deliver them to an overseas target?
The answer was a resounding "no." One highly respected analyst from a "front-line state" said "we have created a nuclear power" all on our own.