[gregfjohnson]

What I wonder about is all of the technologies that go into ICBM's with nuclear weapons. My layman's guess is that there is active support and collaboration of the NK nuclear program from outside. North Korea is a headache for the US and other western powers, one more thing to consume policy bandwidth and military preparedness. This would seem to be in the interests of China and Russia, and perhaps others. I don't worry too much about the threats that periodically emanate from North Korean; if they start to exceed their utility from the perspective of China and Russia, the needed resources to maintain a viable nuclear program can be quickly shut off. I do hope that I will live to see a "1989" moment in which the North Korean regime is overthrown, and relegated to a horrible and sad footnote in human history.

[laurencerowe]

While Russia and China don’t want to see North Korea collapse as existing nuclear powers they don’t especially want to see other countries acquire nuclear weapons.

Active support and collaboration came from Pakistan, Iran and Libya who were all trying to develop nuclear weapons of their own.

https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...

[walrus01]

Google "aq khan pakistan north korea"

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=aq+khan+p...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan

Yes there was a great deal of outside help with their enrichment and weapons design.

[aredox]

Both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles are technologies from the 1940's.

They don't need outside help.

[spookie]

Well, these are multiple times more powerful. Not exactly last century's tech. There are other factors too, like the sanctions these countries are under. One might say that some friendships were harnessed over common enemies, but I digress.

[jjk166]

Remember that it took about 10 years for North Korea to go from it's first nuclear weapons test (which fizzled) to something that's probably a deliverable nuclear weapon, and they had spent decades before that to get to the first test. Nuclear weapons require great precision but they're not especially complicated devices. Any nation state, even the very poorest, should have no difficulty designing a nuclear weapon. It's the refinement of the design and the acquisition of the materials that is difficult, and even then the challenge is more in doing it clandestinely. Even then, the cost of the manhattan project, which not only developed two different nuclear weapons in 4 years, but also discovered a lot of the basic underlying physics from scratch, all in secret and with 1940s era equipment cost about $23 Billion adjusted for inflation. Similarly, the development contract for first American ICBM cost about $4 Billion in todays dollars. North Korea benefits from decades of scientific and technological advancement since that time, and it doesn't cost much to employ someone when you can throw their family into a camp, but even if we assume that it nevertheless would cost them as much to develop such technologies, over the course of 30 years that still represents a reasonably small fraction of North Korea's GDP. North Korea's long history of failures are pretty clear evidence that they were not given the design and manufacturing capability necessary to produce working nuclear weapons or missile systems. While no doubt there has been communication with other state actors over the decades, the idea that they are receiving active support is not at all supported by evidence, and indeed the embarrassingly long development time implies that either there is a great deal of incompetence in the development effort, active sabotage, or likely both.

[nurettin]

I thought the soviets built it in a cave with a bunch of scraps.