Pompeo says the U. S. is working overtime to prevent Pyongyang from selling weapons and transferring missile technology.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that the U. S. intelligence community was concerned that a cash-starved and expansionist North Korea could sell its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technology to other countries, including Iran, and that failure to uncover such transfers could trigger a global nuclear arms race.
Pompeo’s comments came in response to a question about whether Tehran could use its existing cooperation agreements with North Korea to clandestinely advance its own nuclear weapons program without being discovered by the United States or the international enforcers of the 2016 six-party Iran nuclear deal. One option: sending its scientists to Pyongyang to obtain advanced training, or even warhead designs.
“It’s a real risk,” Pompeo said during an appearance at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, noting that it was his one-year anniversary on the job. “We think we have a pretty good understanding of what’s taking place there today. Having said that, I am the first person to admit that intelligence organizations can miss important information.”
“These are terribly difficult problems in incredibly tight spaces, and when you are moving information, it is sometimes difficult to detect that that information has moved,” Pompeo said of such technology transfers. “So if someone asks me as the senior intelligence leader of the CIA, can you guarantee this [would be uncovered], I would say absolutely not.”
Pompeo said the CIA and other U. S. intelligence agencies were working overtime to prevent that. They are also scrambling to provide President Donald Trump with options to contain North Korea’s broader nuclear ambitions, he said, and in a way that doesn’t escalate the already intensifying confrontation into open warfare.
One of his biggest concerns, Pompeo said, is that once North Korea achieves the ability to mass-produce nuclear weapons — estimated at sometime in the near future — it could spur other countries that have resisted such efforts to want the same capability.
“One of the risks of allowing the North Korean regime to continue to have this nuclear capability is this proliferation risk, that this technology they have developed and then figured out how to manufacture… would then be proliferated elsewhere in the world,” Pompeo said. “And, secondarily, it doesn’t take too much imagination to understand that if they continue to have that nuclear weapons system, and if the Iranians make advances in theirs, that many other countries around the world will decide me too, that I want to have one of those things that that guy has.