Senior Science Fellow Philip Coyle was quoted in Politico.
“I do think it changes the urgency to engage in North Korea,” said Philip Coyle, a former head of weapons testing for the Pentagon who is now at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation in Washington. “Obviously, time is not on our side here, with North Korea doing more missile tests and now six nuclear tests. The pace of the missile program has picked up, and so, you could argue, has the nuclear program. The yield keeps going up.”
Coyle, who also oversaw nuclear weapons development at the Department of Energy, is confident that the North Koreans are working on more powerful atomic weapons, including possibly a two-stage hydrogen bomb as Pyongyang claims — or at minimum a souped-up version of its earlier weapons tests.
