North Korea already has the capacity to launch a nuclear missile strike against Seoul and Tokyo, even before the long-range rocket test that it is promising in the next few days, an international think-tank has reported.

According to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, foreign intelligence agencies believe that the North has successfully miniaturised nuclear warheads to the extent that they can be mounted on tried and tested medium-range Nodong missiles. Such a development would seriously alter the balance of power between North Korea’s large but poorly equipped military and the South Korean and US forces ranged against it.

It also suggests that the intense international anxiety being expressed about the imminent ballistic rocket test is misplaced. The Taepodong 2, which potentially has the range to strike Alaska or Hawaii, is in its earliest stages of development — and in any case appears to be the vehicle for a space satellite rather than a warhead.

“Pyongyang’s inventory of short-range and medium-range road-mobile ballistic missiles poses a more imminent threat,” says the ICG report. “Although North Korea has not demonstrated the capability to assemble a miniaturised nuclear bomb for delivery with a ballistic missile, intelligence sources believe it has recently assembled and deployed nuclear weapons for the Nodong.”

Western military planners have long calculated that North Korea could never win an all out war with the US and South Korea — the only question is how much damage it could inflict before aerial bombing and land invasion disabled its military machine. With 13,000 artillery pieces buried close to the border between the two Koreas, and chemical and biological warheads, it was always understood that the North could inflict economically devastating conventional damage on the South Korean capital, Seoul.

If the new report is correct then North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, may have the potential to kill millions of people in Japan, as well as the South, and to lay waste to US bases and airfields in both countries.

North Korea has announced that it will launch a satellite-bearing space rocket between April 4 and 8, and is keeping up the fusillade of fiery language in the face of foreign demands that it abandon its plans. Satellite photographs have revealed a large rocket in position on the launch pad at the Musudan-ri test site in the northeast of the country.

State television reported today that US and South Korean aircraft had conducted “intensive” spying missions last month. “Should the US imperialist racketeers dare to intrude espionage planes into our territorial sky, interfering with our preparations for a satellite launch for peaceful purposes, our revolutionary forces will shoot them down unsparingly,” it said.

The US, Japan and South Korea say that, even if the rocket is a space vehicle rather than a missile, it has the capacity to be used for military purposes, and therefore violates United Nations Security Council resolutions. But even if it was loaded with a nuclear warhead, the Taepodong 2 takes weeks to assemble, fuel and arm giving ample time for it to be destroyed on the launch pad.

The ICG argues that the true danger lies with shorter-range weapons, some of which are mobile and therefore difficult to detect. They include variants of the Scud, which could strike South Korea, and the Nodong which could reach much of Japan. Pyongyang also has a short-range tactical weapon called the Toksa or Viper, which is highly accurate up to 120km. The Musudan, which can be transported by road, could reach US bases on the Pacific island of Guam.

US intelligence sources say that the North has been basing some of its Nodongs close to the Chinese border in the hope that the US would hesitate to strike them for fear of angering Beijing.

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