A point about President Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un that didn’t fit in today’s Morning Jolt: On Wednesday, Trump said:
I get along with him, right? And you know what? The fact that I get along with him, that’s a good thing. Not a bad thing. He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons. Should have never allowed it to happen. They should have never allowed it. If I were president, I wouldn’t have allowed it. But he’s got them. [Emphasis added.]
This was the first time any U.S. official had provided such a precise count of North Korea’s nuclear weapons arsenal. For what it’s worth, South Korean defense minister Ahn Gyu-back said Thursday: “Our estimate is between 80 and 120, but giving an accurate figure is limited.” The discrepancy may well reflect the term “very powerful,” or the number of nuclear weapons under construction or in development, or an assessment of how many nuclear weapons in the North Korean arsenal are deemed reliably operational. Or the South Korean estimate may reflect a more recently updated figure.
Now, if the U.S. intelligence community tells the president that North Korea has 57 nuclear weapons, then there is a very good chance that North Korea has 57 nuclear weapons. The U.S. intel community, as well as our allies, put a lot of effort and resources into tracking the North Korean nuclear weapons program, and nuclear weapons aren’t exactly easy to hide.
But there is a nonzero chance that North Korea has more than 57 nuclear weapons, as the South Korean defense ministry asserts. And if North Korea has, say, 59 nuclear weapons, the president’s statement effectively tells the regime in Pyongyang that the U.S. knows about 57 of them, but does not know about the other two.
It is also conceivable (but not particularly likely) that North Korea has fewer than 57 nuclear weapons. Either way, Trump’s statement gives North Korean intelligence a sense of what the U.S. knows.
Either way, it is not a good idea for the president of the United States to blurt out specific details about what the U.S. knows about the arsenals of hostile regimes in off-the-cuff remarks while showing off construction at the White House.