Hecker: Don't forget North Korea nukes amid movie flap

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The threats, turmoil, and media circus surrounding the Hollywood satire "The Interview," in which bungling American journalists assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, have put the country in the international spotlight again. Often forgotten amid all this comedy, though, is the very unfunny fact that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has been relentlessly expanding for a decade, and poses a real and deadly threat to the rest of Northeast Asia.

Senior Fellow Siegfried Hecker writes in this Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists piece that North Korea today may possess a nuclear arsenal of roughly 12 nuclear weapons, half likely fueled by plutonium and half by highly enriched uranium.

And in this related Q&A, David Straub, a Korea expert at FSI's Walter Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, answers questions about the Sony hacking after North Korea condemned "The Interivew."