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President Laurie Patton (l.) converses with Jeffrey Lewis and Melissa Hanham prior to their “Keeping Tabs on the Bomb” lecture.

MIDDLEBURY – Two of the most widely recognized experts about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Jeffrey Lewis and Melissa Hanham from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, presented the lecture “Keeping Tabs on the Bomb One Pixel at a Time” on February 28 at Middlebury College.

The timing of their lecture couldn’t have been planned better since Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and Hanham, his senior research associate, had both been quoted extensively in a February 24 New York Times article headlined “What One Photo Tells Us About North Korea’s Nuclear Program.” (The photo, shown below, purports to show the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, with a nuclear warhead and missile.)

For a Middlebury audience of more than 75 faculty, staff, and students, Lewis and Hanham showed some of the techniques used to determine what weapons North Korea has, where the government builds and stores its weapons, and where they test their nuclear devices.

“We use all kinds of new tools and new data to get at really tough nuclear-weapons problems in places like North Korea where that kind of information is not freely available,” Lewis said.

Analysts from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey mined a wealth of information from the above propaganda photo of Kim Jong Un with a purported nuclear warhead and missile. (Click on image to enlarge.)

– With reporting by Robert Keren and photo by Todd Balfour