The Obama administration is trying to hide the fact that North Korea has nuclear missile warheads, according to a report by Mark Schneider, a former Pentagon strategic analyst and senior official at the office of the secretary of defense.

Schneider’s assessment was published April 28 in the journal Comparative Strategy, The Washington Free Beacon reported Monday.

Schneider’s report entitled “The North Korean Nuclear Threat to the United States” (see abstract here) noted that in an unclassified assessment made public a year ago, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) concluded with “moderate confidence” that Pyongyang “currently has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles.”

“This is disturbing news,” according to the report, which termed North Korea’s communist regime one of the most “paranoid and militaristic dictatorships on the planet.”
While Pyongyang has long made nuclear attack threats, “the scope, magnitude, and frequency of these threats have vastly increased in 2013,” Schneider added.

More recently, North Korea threatened nuclear strikes against the United States and its allies.

Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, told the House Armed Services Committee April 2 that Pyongyang has been working to develop the capability to carry out large-scale, destructive  attacks.

“North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles” and “is investing heavily in longer-range missiles with the potential to target the U.S. homeland,” he added.

But critics charge that the Obama administration has sought to hide the alarming intelligence on North Korea because it undermines Obama's goal of eliminating nuclear weapons.

National Intelligence Director James Clapper disagreed with the Defense Department analysis, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel claimed that neither North Korea nor Iran is able to attack the United States with nuclear weapons.

But Schneider argues the administration is deluding itself and that if anything, the Defense Department may be understating the North Korean threat.

“The argument that there is no current nuclear-missile threat to the U.S. from North Korea is based upon the dubious assertion that North Korean nuclear weapons are too heavy to be delivered by the North Korea ICBM that successfully orbited a satellite,” his report said.

Schneider warned that the findings of Defense Intelligence Agency “may be an understatement” in light of reports detailing nuclear-missile warhead proliferation involving China, Pakistan and North Korea, and defector reports that Pyongyang has nuclear warheads that can be launched on missiles.

His report said it is difficult to know how many warheads are in Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal and that an estimate of 10 devices could be low. The regime’s escalating threats must also “be seen within a larger context because North Korea has nuclear, chemical and perhaps biological weapons.”