The land of the flighty

[Lissa]

May I point out that illegal tech transfer has been going on for some decades, as well as "turn a blind eye" tech transfer? There are other governments and actors than the US government, some of whom don't give a flying hoot about American security.

I tend to believe that the NK's, with sufficient effort, would do the research and produce the materials on their own. As Pete points out, you are looking at 60's and 70's tech. One man's rubbish is another's treasure.

As to them weaponizing a missile with MIRV's or a nuclear tip, the US and Russians were doing that in the 1960's. This is 40 year old tech. I concur with you that the NK's have their work cut out for them, given the mess their economy and industrial sector is in, but they are not quadraplegic, economically speaking. I am also confident that their autonomous ability to produce the NoDong and TaePoDong missiles speaks rather well of their industrial plant.

Occhi

As I said, the key problem they face is miniturization along with the crighton switches. Likewise, they look like they're using Manahattan era (pre-Hbomb) tech for the weapons as most believe the test on the 9th was a Littleboy style bomb (gun type). Overall, they're looking at pretty low yield weapons (if the 9th's test was a fizzle, they're having problems with the gun type working properly as well) for a lot of weight.

While the TaePoDong (IIRC, that's their newest design) can potentially reach the US, with a gun style warhead, they'd be lucky to get it to fly to the tip of the Aluetians (although that is more than enough range to hit anywhere in SK, Japan, Peking if they're really peekish, and some of the cities in Siberia). The real crux here is whether NK can figure out how to get a weapon to chain properly using a pit as an initiator for a multistage bomb like the big boys™ use (typically a Fission - Fission - Fusion - Fission - Fusion chain).