Question

How did North Korea (essentially a third world country) become a nuclear power- how did they get this technology - fission technology and missile technology?

Answer 1

North Korea is known for its blustering and provocative propaganda but those in the know take seriously the nuclear threat faced by the region.

The "hermit kingdom" is reported to have between 13 and 30 nuclear weapons In 1950, a few months into the Korean War, U.S. President Harry Truman said in a press conference that "strong thought" was being given to the use of an atomic bomb. Truman's nuclear threat only that remained, with the Korean War officially ending in an armistice in 1953. But U.S. forces have dropped more than 650,000 tons of bombs and napalm to North Korean targets,

During the war, North Korea sought to convince its wartime ally China to share their nuclear weapons capabilities. Supreme Leader Kim Il-Sung, grandfather of today's leader Kim Jong-Un, twice pleaded for support from Chinese dictator Mao Zedong but was rejected on both occasions, Denied an simple road to a nuclear bomb, and North Korea set about paving together an indigenous nuclear weapons programme. It helped the country to have base nuclear infrastructure already in operation. North Korea, as a founding member of the Soviet Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, had sent its scientists to the Soviet Union for years to train in nuclear energy

In 1964 the Soviets also helped North Korea build its first nuclear reactor. The reactor was used for medical, commercial, and research purposes to produce radioactive isotopes. But the nation began developing military technology in the years that followed, calling its best scientists home including from Canada but although North Korea's scientists had the technological skills, they lacked designs for the highly complex facilities needed to manufacture nuclear weapons. North Korea set about importing sensitive nuclear equipment from Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, taking advantage of the lack of sufficient nuclear intelligence protections at the time.

North Korean state media announced the country's first nuclear weapon test in 2006, two years after Hecker's visit. By then, the country's scientists had gradually begun redirecting their energies away from nuclear weapons dependent on plutonium to those dependent on uranium. This is because, away from prying satellites and nuclear inspectors, the facilities required to manufacture nuclear-grade uranium can more easily be concealed underground. In early 2015, experts analyzed debris from a North Korean satellite launch, and found that it contained components manufactured in the UK. And routed. the Chinese firms,

In 2016, North Korea spent a lot of time refuting any big myth about what it 'could't do' in its nuclear missile programme, China's 'conscious failure' in both clamping down on front-end companies and tightening export controls resulted in such a massive influx about illicit goods to North Korea that it would take 'a huge effort' to rein in it.