When President Donald Trump took office, his intelligence officials briefed him that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s nuclear program was up to four years away from producing weapons able to hit an American city. As tests in recent months have shown, however, those estimates were severely off.
In an in-depth report on the critical intelligence failure, The Times reporters zeroed in on two key findings: “They assumed that North Korea would need about as much time to solve the rocket science as other nations did during the Cold War, underestimating its access to both advanced computer modeling and foreign expertise,” wrote reporters David E. Sanger and William J. Broad wrote. “They also misjudged Mr. Kim, who took control of the dynastic regime in late 2011 and made the weapons program more of a priority than his father or grandfather did.”
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