BEIJING — US Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned Tuesday that North Korea was within five years of being able to strike the continental United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile, and said that, combined with its expanding nuclear program, the country “is becoming a direct threat to the United States.”
Mr. Gates is a former director of the C.I.A., and his statement, officials said, reflected both a new assessment by American intelligence officials and his own concern that Washington had consistently underestimated the pace at which the North was developing nuclear and missile technologies.
It is unclear how recent the new assessment may be, but Mr. Gates’ remarks, made just an hour after he met with Hu Jintao, China’s president, may have been partly intended to convince China that the Obama administration no longer regards the North as a concern only in the region. The administration has increasingly put pressure on China to try to persuade North Korea, a longtime China ally, to give up its nuclear weapons program.
“The Chinese are always talking about their ‘core interests’ and threats they may have to respond to,” said one American official deeply involved in North Korea strategy. “They needed to hear that we have a few, too.”
In comments to reporters during a visit to Beijing, Mr. Gates said he was worried that within a relatively short time frame North Korea would simultaneously continue to develop nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. That combination, he said, had increased the need for pressure on North Korea, particularly if there is another provocation on South Korea by the North like the deadly shelling of a South Korean island in November.
“We consider this a situation of real concern, and we think there is some urgency in proceeding down the track of negotiations,” Mr. Gates said.
Mr. Gates said he nonetheless expected North Korea’s ability to be limited. “I don’t think it’s an immediate threat,” he said.
But his remarks were the first to put a time frame on when the North, which has conducted two nuclear tests, including one that fizzled, might be able to launch a nuclear-capable missile that could cross the Pacific. That has been a much-debated point for more than a decade, and the subject of a lengthy study on missile threats conducted by Donald H. Rumsfeld before he became President George W. Bush’s first defense secretary.
Mr. Gates made his comments to reporters on the same day that China, in a show of force for the United States, apparently conducted the first test flight of its new stealth fighter jet. The 15-minute flight occurred just hours before Mr. Gates met with President Hu to talk about improving relations between the Chinese and American militaries and ways to reduce tensions during a nascent arms buildup between the two countries.
Mr. Gates’s new assessment on North Korea is a significant shift for the Obama administration, which until now has viewed the North first and foremost as a proliferation threat, fearing that it might sell its existing missiles and nuclear devices to other countries, like Iran. North Korea has a long history of missile trade with Iran, Syria and Pakistan, among other nations, and is believed to have provided the technology for Syria to build a reactor. The reactor was destroyed in a 2007 air raid by Israel.
But Mr. Gates changed that emphasis, by focusing on the North’s capability to aim its small arsenal at the United States. Already there is an antimissile unit based at Fort Greely, Alaska, armed with interceptor missiles designed to stop a small attack, presumably by North Korea, before it hits the United States.
Implicit in Mr. Gates’s five-year assessment was the possibility that the North could soon solve one of its biggest technological hurdles: manufacturing a warhead small enough to fit atop a missile. Exploding a nuclear device underground, which North Korea did in 2006 and again in 2009, is comparatively simple. Manufacturing a warhead that is light, small and reliable is a far more complex art.
Nuclear inspectors who were inside North Korea periodically until 2009 have never publicly reported seeing work done on a warhead. But it is unlikely that they would be shown such efforts, even though the North quit the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty eight years ago.
It is unclear whether the North obtained designs for a warhead from another desperately poor country — possibly Pakistan, which sold uranium enrichment equipment to the North. Designing such a warhead from scratch is difficult, as Iran has learned.
Predicting missile capabilities is notoriously difficult. Documents released last year by WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy organization, revealed sharp disagreements between American and Russian experts on Iran’s missile technology.
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