North Korea plutonium test confirmed

ArmsControlWonk: North Korea plutonium test confirmed: "The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a very short statement confirming that the North Korean test was nuclear. Thom Shanker and David Sanger's article in the New York Times says that US intelligence has concluded that the test was a plutonium device, not uranium. Sig Hecker knows a thing or two about North Korea's plutonium (see p.5 of that link, paragraph starting with 'So they slid open the wooden box and inside were two glass jars &mdash two marmalade jars actually &mdash with screw on tops.')

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The NYT article also has an interesting section on what this plutonium vs. uranium determination may mean politically. Uranium would mean Clinton messed up, plutonium suggests the error was on Bush's watch:

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Unlike the Clinton administration in 1994, the current Bush administration chose not to threaten to destroy North Korea’s fuel and nuclear reprocessing facilities if they tried to make weapons.

Emphasis mine. In a particularly insightful comment on the same page:

"According to the unclassified November, 2002 CIA estimate here :

We assess that North Korea embarked on the effort to develop a centrifuge-based uranium enrichment program about two years ago.

Which would mean that the effort to develop a uranium enrichment program did not even start until the end of 2000. The estimate goes on to say that a uranium processing plant would not be fully operational until the middle of the decade, at the earliest."

(Via ArmsControlWonk.com.)