excuse me, we have doubt that north korea has reached the stage of miniaturization. that story in 2013 started off as a worry about north korea story. it ended up being a worry about our defense intelligence agency story. and the defense intelligence agency, it was not just a mike flynn thing. they already had a difficult reputation on matters like this. you might remember that that was the agency that argued vociferously more than any other intelligence agency that iraq had nuclear weapons. before the u.s. invasion of iraq in 2003. of course, at the time, not only did iraq not have nuclear weapons, they didn t even have a nuclear program. but dia insisted they had. they were wrong about that ten years earlier, they were wrong about north korea miniaturizing nukes in 2013. and not long thereafter, the head of the dia, mike flynn,
washington post article. it wasn t some new development that was breaking that day or the day before. it was a washington post article that he was responding to. just to be fair hold on. to be fair, it s washington post and cnn reporting that s about new at least new production, not necessarily new nuclear the miniaturization of the warheads. that s understand he already had, presumably. it s hard to imagine that he didn t already know that. he probably knew that for some time. the difference was that it was then reported by the post and by cnn. the question is, what then what triggered then his making those remarks? you took to twitter last night. you said that you are hoping and praying for wisdom and restraint from our leaders. what are you what is that about? what are you worried might happen? what i m worried about is we
tonight, this is not the consensus view from the entire intelligence community. so if you re feeling like you ve heard this story before today, and if you have experienced this freakout before and it turned out not to be true, you re remembering that right. there are lots of reasons to are skeptical here. we ve heard this story before when it turned out not to be the case. but last time in 2013, the south korean defense ministry came out and said, no, no, we don t think this is true. this time we re not hearing any words of caution from credible foreign intelligence agencies like that. this time, to the contrary, the defense ministry in japan, just today, published a white paper saying actually this could be true. japan s defense ministry said today, quote, it is possible that north korea has achieved the miniaturization of nuclear weapons. so, i mean, we have heard this story before. it wasn t true the first time we heard it.
well, it is funny, andrea, for those of us who kind of watch this thing, watch the statement yesterday as if it were this zapruder film frame by frame, you could see him peer down at a document that was on the desk, he was attending an opioid conference. i thought he was reading something. it was the fact sheet for the opioid event. the fire and fury comment, it was something they were batting around owl dall day. there were a number of meetings specific to korea, plus the presidential daily briefing, but i was told he was informed of the washington post story, which disclosed that the north koreans had achieved miniaturization of nuclear warheads, he had gotten really riled up. they told him to expect to talk about it. but that was the extent of the briefing, and interestingly enough, his new chief of staff, john kelly, knew that he was broadly going to speak about
that north korea has achieved the miniaturization of nuclear weapons. so, i mean, we have heard this story before and it wasn t true the first time we heard it. but this time there isn t anybody shooting it down aggressively like there was in 2013. and this year there is some soft or at least potential corroboration from japan which, like south korea, would be in a position to know. i mean, this also comes at a time when we re getting used to undisputed reports, proof from north korea that they re making significant progress on other aspects of their capability. they ve set off a missile tests that have shown genuine advancement in terms of how far out in the world they can project force. in may they shot a weapon up in the air that went 12 miles. u.s. officials said if they had aimed it as more of an angle, it could have conceivably been