North Korea is a hard target for the intelligence community to penetrate. Satellites and other classified intelligence capabilities, known as “national technical means (NTM),” monitor the North continuously, but the United States lacks assets on the ground. As a result, it faces considerable uncertainty about North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, economy and internal politics, not to mention its intentions. For instance, U.S. intelligence still does not know for sure how much plutonium the North reprocessed before 1991 or when the North began enriching uranium in quantity—and hence how many nuclear devices it may have.
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