North Korea could have an atomic bomb and between 30 and 60 small mobile nuclear warheads, Sig Hecker has warned.
Hecker, who was the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of America’s atomic bomb, warned that photos of Kim Jong-un posing with his nuclear arsenal could show an atomic bomb.
Speaking to CBS News’ 60 Minutes, he said: “What’s even more important than the 30 or 60, is how small can they make them.”
Photos from 2016 show the rogue regime’s leader posing with what he claimed was a nuclear warhead small enough to be mounted on a missile.
Asked what it looked like, Hecker said it resembled a fission bomb.
He said: “This to me is one that I would call a spherical fission bomb, in other words, the atomic bomb.
“It looks like a simple bomb. However what I found most important about this is the size of it, it looks to be about 60 centimetres.
Hecker was was shown another photo of Kim’s weapons from September when North Korea unveiled a sleeker warhead design.
The regime said it was a much more powerful thermonuclear weapon.
The nuclear expert said: “That shape is consistent with what we would call the two-stage thermonuclear weapon. What that essentially means is sort of a modern hydrogen bomb.”
Asked whether it could be mounted to a missile, Hecler said: “They definitely want us to think so. In the background they actually show the warhead positioned in the nose cone of the missile which we interpreted to be an ICBM.”
Kim Jong-un’s repeated tests of his atomic arsenal have caused tensions to heat up in Asia, bringing condemnation from numerous powers and fanned World War 3 fears.