Friday, April 19, 2013

NKorea 'bark worse than bite': expert

NKorea 'bark worse than bite': expert: North Korea is incapable of carrying out most of its threats of recent weeks, a prominent US expert who has visited the country's nuclear facilities several times said Thursday.

"The bark is much greater than the bite," Siegfried Hecker from Stanford University, who revealed in 2010 the existence of a uranium enrichment facility in North Korea, said in Vienna.

"All of these things that they have threatened to do, most of them they cannot do," said Hecker, currently a visiting scientist at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation.

He played down the significance of North Korea's April 2 announcement that it would re-start its main Yongbyon nuclear complex, mothballed in 2007.