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At left, is an Iranian numerically controlled lathe milling machine forming cooling channels in a rocket engine.

It is impossible to tell the scale of this engine — and therefore impossible to uniquely link it to the Safir second stage.

However, machining these channels, as opposed to using a corrugated insert, is a major technological change from SCUD technology.

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David Wright and Ted Postol have done a really first rate job of analyzing the U’nha-2 and Safir development programs, as exemplified by their excellent article on the U’nha-2. But I think it is important to at least consider an alternative: these missiles represent a much larger portion of indigenous production than just assembling components. This is not to say that Wright and Postol are wrong in their conclusions, only to consider the question.

An International Missile Development Consortium?

North Korea is widely viewed as not testing their missiles enough before they sell them to “client” states. The Nodong missile, which forms the basis for the Shahab-3 and its variants, was tested successfully just once before “being sold to Iran and Pakistan.” This is an unreasonable flight test program and has led many to conjecture that North Korea is either buying complete missiles from Russia, missiles already engineered and developed, or missile components. That could, of course, be very possible and has unfortunate implications for the West’s relationship with Russia. Another alternative of this basic idea, just a small variant really, is that North Korea bought the production line for an obsolete or canceled missile system and modified it to fit its own special circumstances. With this head start, it then formed an international “consortium” with Iran and possibly Pakistan to continue the development. Moving its development program into other countries would have significant advantages for North Korea. For one, while Iranian missile launches are controversial, they do not appear as controversial as the DPRK’s missile tests. This is even more true for Pakistan where any controversy is mainly a regional one.

Such a development consortium would not be the first one ever created. The one I am most familiar with is the Badr 2000/Condor II development program where Iraq, in essence, funded the development of the missile by several other nations. Iraq received a number of contributory production plants that increased their capabilities considerably while failing to produce the desired missile. If North Korea bought the equipment for an obsolete or canceled production line, this would undoubtedly violate many of the rules of the MTCR but might not be as suspicious a violation, especially in a country suffering from the economic catastrophe that was Russia in the 1990s, as selling missile components. After all, most of the equipment could be considered dual use and could appear in separate manifests etc. All the subterfuges proliferation profiteers have used in the past. Importantly, it is much, much easier to reverse engineer a production line than it is to reverse engineer a missile component. After all, once you know the production line components, it is quite easy to buy similar or even exactly the same production equipment else where. The difficulty in reverse engineering is to infer the production scheme.

Too Advanced for Purchasing Production Lines?

An Iranian welding the Shahab engine injection head.
This illustrates the shop-floor know-how that is so
important — and so hard to acquire.

If this happened for the Nodong missile, is it possible it could also happen for an SS-N-6? In fact, it seems even more likely to me that it would happen for these more advanced missile components. The world is full of SA-2 engines, as Iraq showed by purchasing these engines in late 2002 ( see UNMOVIC’s Compendium, volume IV, p. 581.) The closer they get to strategic weapons, the more they come under the control of various treaties. (I’m not sure if SS-N-6 missiles ever came under any of the START etc. treaties, do any of you wonk-readers know?) It is possible that makes them harder to illicitly dispose of. It makes their production lines, however, that much more valuable.

( See my posting on estimating the costs of just the know-how associated with the Badr-2000. That alone was worth $75 million.)

What Proliferators Want

Proliferators, just as would-be producers of civilian products, want access to the technology and they are very seldom satisfied with just components. In fact, the financial inducements needed to entice developing countries into foregoing civilian technology transfer have to be considerable. It seems unreasonable that both Iran and North Korea would voluntarily put themselves into the situation David and Ted suggest, that they only have a finite number of components, and make themselves susceptible to the types of international restrictions that would eventually shut off their missile programs.

Comment [21]

James collected a couple of articles on Yinhe incident for an October 2008 post entitled, The Yinhe Incident.

Worth revisiting.

Comment

According to David Sanger in the NYT, some folks in the Administration are thinking very carefully about the intelligence problem in interdiction:

Pentagon officials are clearly not eager to confront the Kang Nam 1. The intelligence about what is on board is typically murky. Some say they suspect small arms, which are banned by the United Nations resolution but hardly a major threat. Members of Mr. Obama’s team who served in the Clinton administration remember past embarrassments, including the interception of a Chinese ship suspected of carrying chemical precursors in the early 1990s. When the ship was finally cornered, the cargo turned out to be benign.

That’s the Yinhe incident, for those of you keeping score at home.

X-posted from TW.

Comment [4]

A couple weeks ago, Benn Tannenbaum invited Ted Postol to come down to Washington. Ted gave a fascinating talk, in which he argued that the second stage of the Unha may be a re-purposed SS-N-6.

This is a plausible answer to the BM-25 — the North Korean bought kits to use as a second stage of the Taepodong series.

David Wright and Ted have a provocative article in the Bulletin suggesting that the Unha-2 “second stage appears identical to the single-stage Soviet R-27 sea-launched ballistic missile, called the SS-N-6 in the United States, which the Soviet Union first deployed in 1968.”

First the bad news: An SS-N-6 second stage massively increases the range-payload curve (doing away with the golf ball of death), putting CONUS within range of a 1 ton payload from North Korea.

Now, the good news: North Korea can’t indigenously manufacture the second stage, so if we can secure the rest of the SS-N-6 kits components (and cut off external assistance), the North Korea ICBM program is at a technological dead-end:

Analysis of the Taepodong-1 and Unha-2 launchers strongly suggests that they may be designed and built around components of Soviet missiles. The apparent lack of testing of these components by North Korea suggests that they aren’t indigenously produced systems but are existing components that North Korea has been able to combine to build multistage launchers. The Taepodong-1 appears to have used a modified Nodong missile for the first stage; a modified engine from a Soviet surface-to-air missile for the second stage; and the engine from a solid-fueled Soviet SS-21 tactical missile for the third stage. As noted above, the second stage of the Unha-2 appears to be a modified SS-N-6 missile, which was produced by the Makeyev bureau in the 1960s.

It’s possible that North Korea learned, with significant Russian assistance, to manufacture Scuds and Nodongs and is therefore not limited in its number of these missiles, assuming it can acquire the necessary materials. But this is much less likely for the SS-N-6, which is a far more advanced system due to its use of highly optimized rocket motors, very energetic propellant, and a complex airframe fabricated from aluminum alloy.

None of this evidence is conclusive, but because it has important policy implications, it should be a high priority for the United States to assess it and work with Russia to determine what technical assistance and components North Korea may have received.

Comment [8]

Dan Pinkston pointed out this gem from KCNA:

Taedonggang Beer

Pyongyang, June 25 (KCNA) — The beers including black beer and rice beer made by the Taedonggang Beer Factory are these days popular with the Pyongyang citizens.

Beer houses are crowed with working people who look pleased with their successes in the current 150-day campaign.

It was Juche 91 (2002) that the just built Taedonggang Beer Factory began supplying beer to the citizens.

The cold and soft Taedonggang beer rich in gas content immediately came into great favor among the customers by catering to their tastes.

Its fermentation degree is 77.5 percent.

The beer houses distributed rationally in residential quarters regularly serve beer carried to them directly from the factory.

The refrigerator vans carrying beer have a traffic privilege on the streets of Pyongyang like cars carrying soybean milk to children.

The citizens call Taedonggang beer “cold yet warm beer” as it is associated with the warm care of General Secretary Kim Jong Il for the people.

Comment [7]

The International Crisis Group, to my mind, is a very uneven operation. It also annoys me that they never sign their reports.

But Dan Pinkston, out in Seoul, has a trio of very good reports on North Korea’s Chemical and Biological Weapons Programs, Nuclear and Missile Programs and Getting Back to Talks.

Top notch stuff from a top notch analyst.

I am less optimistic, at least in the near term, than Dan seems to be about getting back to talks with North Korea — though I agree that we need to be ready to engage them, as Dan says, “if and when there appears to be a prospect, however uncertain, that the North is willing to engage seriously.”

Comment [2]

Click on the image for a larger version

In a typical one hour period, five US low earth orbit satellites pass over the Port of Rajin

Yesterday, I pointed out that the only way for the West to tell the difference between a cargo container full of uranium gas centrifuges and a container full of pig iron as it was being loaded might be increased security associated with the centrifuges. That, of course, assumes two things: 1) that the West can see the loading and 2) North Korea decides that it wants to include the security. After all, Syria apparently decided to do without anti-aircraft batteries and other security measures for its Box on the Euphrates in order to avoid signaling the US that it should pay special attention to that building. We all know how well that worked: it seems to have fooled the US but Israel, with its spies in Syria (the ones who smuggled out the photos of the construction, presumably from a central office in Damascus) managed to obtain the evidence they needed. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that Israel has spies in North Korea (I guess I could be wrong about that) so we are probably left with using technical means to watch the loading and unloading of ships.

One possibility is to use satellites and another is using UAVs. Let’s consider using satellites, mainly because this post is already getting too long. As the image above shows, the US has a great many low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. The orbital elements for these satellites comes from an amateur satellite observers website and could very well include satellites that have ceased to function. (That’s my fault and not the amateur observers. On the hand, North Korea might not know any better than me which satellites were functioning and which are not.) They do not include the Navy’s NOSS satellites which are used to track ship locations. Those satellites were going to be considered tomorrow when I thought we would look at tracking ships on the high seas as a way of determining if their cargo might be suspicious. It turns out, however, that there might be other, more convenient, ways of doing that (See Allen Thomson’s posting and the responses to that) so I’m going to skip that post.

If you simply require that a satellite be above the local horizon to spy on North Korea, then these satellites supply considerable coverage. ( Click here to see a graph of the satellite elevations over the Port of Rajin during a three day period.) Of course, viewing a scene at a grazing angle—unless you are something like an electronics intelligence satellite which could conceivably pick up the radio chatter between security elements—can prove difficult to interpret. Of course, it’s still possible to see things at angles very close to grazing, just things like buildings and trees get in the way. That and the fact that you are looking at very large distances, perhaps as much 3000 km, so the resolution will be very poor.

With that in mind, I plotted the time between satellite passes where a pass is counted as starting when it appears above a certain elevation and ends when it dips below that elevation. ( This plot is shown here for three threshold elevations: 0 degrees, 20 degrees, and 45 degrees.) North Korea, too, could generate just such a plot and know that critical signatures, such as deploying security forces, would have to be timed to fit in between passes. If satellites can detect signatures at grazing angles, then typical separations between US LEO satellite passes is about 10 minutes. That seems very short, though I have no experience deploying security forces. Its worth pointing out that if the satellite is a photoreconnaissance satellite that normally has a resolution of 10 cm at 200 km, it has a resolution of 1.5 m at 3000 km. There might also be a big decrease in sensitivity of electronics intelligence gathering depending on how they normally function.

Going to a 20 degree threshold substantially reduces the slant range but also substantially increases the time between effective passes. Thus, there is an average gap of 34 minutes between satellite passes in that configuration. Much more can happen in 34 minutes than in 10 minutes: more troops could be better deployed etc.

There are still more practical questions to be answered about achieving “reasonable grounds” for interdicting WMD. Clearly human intelligence would be the best. But that has important problems too, such as protecting the life of the informant if you ever have to prove you had “reasonable grounds.” It seems possible to use technical means to increase your confidence by seeing an unusual amount of security. But the most likely clue might simply be the destination: is it another “rogue” nation? Of course, if all the “law abiding” nations won’t trade with a rogue, perhaps their only trade partners are other rogues.

Comment [9]

The Ports of North Korea

Yesterday, we started to get some ballpark numbers relevant to interdicting WMD shipments. Today, we are going to continue to try to get a feel for the problem of determining whether or not there is proscribed material onboard a ship. The first step, I think, is to considering the volume of shipping going into and out of North Korean ports. The larger the volume of shipping, the harder it will be to notice unusual activities. On the other hand, if there are few ocean-going ships, it will be much easier to keep an eye on what is happening. Tomorrow, we will (finally) get down to the question of actually observing the loading of ships. To jump ahead a little, it is going to prove very difficult to spot WMD related containers and the “reasonable grounds” could very well come from knowing where the ship is going. That will be the final entry in this series.

We (i.e. I) only have a snapshot of that shipping as presented by GoogleEarth though it does manage to convey an amazingly vivid sense of the North’s economy. ( If you need further confirmation of it, check out this image of the Korean peninsula taken at night. )

The GoogleEarth image above shows all the port facilities (and then some) found by North Korea Economy Watch . I have only seen evidence of large, ocean going cargo vessels at a couple of these: Rajin and Yuktae-dong (which NKEW labels Ship Construction/Repair),. Chongjin Shipyard and the other “ports” appear to be mainly coastal vessels with the largest ship I’ve seen measuring less than 30 meters long by 4.5 meters wide. If we assumed these could be ocean going vessels, then each one might hold four cargo contains or about 380 centrifuges as compared to the 61 cargo containers needed for a “standard” cascade interconnect bomb plant. It, of course, makes a lot of sense for North Korea to be emphasizing coastal vessels considering how mountainous the terrain is. Only Rajin appears (at least to on my search) to be the only one with port-based cranes for moving cargo. Yuktae-dong has large quays but the large ship visible has ship-based crane. That, of course, means that the other ports could be used by those ocean-going ships with their own cranes if the harbor is accessible to them. On the plus side, however, the North is missing a lot of the lovely crinkly bits, as Slartibartfast might say, that South Korea has and that might make wonderful temporary harbors.

Now, compare the Port of Rajin with the Port of Busan in South Korea. Busan has a ton of ships just waiting at anchor to get their turn at the docks to load/unload. I’ve circled just some of the 200+ meter long ships at anchor. I stopped when I got tired of doing it. This snapshot might be an even better way of judging the international trade of the two countries than the tonnage of flagged ships since the North and South have similar numbers of ships carrying their flags. The difference in harbor occupation is obviously made up of ships flagged by different countries. One thing the West has going for it in terms of following WMD shipping leaving or coming into the DPRK is, therefore, the dearth of ocean-going shipping. If an ocean going ship is detected, it might be easy to follow.

Of course, it might be very hard to discriminate the loading of WMD related equipment from, say, a load of pig iron. Perhaps the only clue might be the extra security associated with transporting centrifuges or other sensitive equipment. Depending on how efficiently the cranes are run, it might take up to five minutes for each container to loaded onboard though it could take considerably shorter. Of course, if they are loading an entire bomb production plant, this could correspond to up to five hours. All of which could be done at night with minimal lighting on the security force.

Tomorrow, we will consider the frequency of visits over the ports by photoreconnaissance satellites as well as viewing them from UAVs.

Comment [6]

I’d bet on it. But a recent statement by the ODNI is raising all sorts of eyebrows:

The U.S. Intelligence Community assesses that North Korea probably conducted an underground nuclear explosion in the vicinity of P’unggye on May 25, 2009. The explosion yield was approximately a few kilotons. Analysis of the event continues. [emphasis added]

The statement does not explain the use of the hedge-word “probably,” but we can make an educated guess about it.

First, it is an established practice of the National Intelligence Council to use words like “probably” or “likely” to convey degrees of certainty about analytic judgments. See, for example, the fifth page of this memorable release from December 2007. Nothing’s ever completely certain.

Second, none of the usual telltale radionuclides were detected after the test, according to this and this. Although this phenomenon is not unheard of, it does at least admit the possibility that the seismic event actually involved a heapin’ helpin’ of conventional explosives, rather than a nuclear explosive.

But merely because it’s possible doesn’t make it plausible. This scenario was discussed at a recent scientific convention on CTBT verification in Vienna and basically dismissed.

One thing is (virtually) certain. If North Korea had been trucking 2,000 tons of TNT up a mountain and packing it into a deep hole, everyone would have noticed.

Comment [13]

UNSC Resolution 1874:

12. Calls upon all Member States to inspect vessels, with the consent of the flag State, on the high seas, if they have information that provides reasonable grounds to believe that the cargo of such vessels contains items the supply, sale, transfer, or export of which is prohibited by paragraph 8 (a), 8 (b), or 8 ( c ) of resolution 1718 (2006) or by paragraph 9 or 10 of this resolution, for the purpose of ensuring strict implementation of those provisions;

With the passage of UNSC resolution 1874 last Saturday, a young techno-wonk’s thoughts immediately turn to the question of how do you have reasonable grounds to stop a ship on the high seas. (I hope to look at the legal questions in a future post, after I finish with these practical details.) We will only consider some of the issues related to nuclear proliferation here. Some rough numbers immediately jump to mind. These include things like: how many centrifuges can you ship in a single cargo container? How many centrifuges fit on a single ship? What is the “background” to detecting such a ship? (Background in the physicist’s sense: is there a lot of shipping going into and leaving North Korea that could “mask” the WMD ship?) Could you detect the loading of a ship using photoreconnaissance satellites? UAV’s? How could you track it? So here goes:

1) How many centrifuges fit in a cargo container? Libya’s centrifuges were packaged in boxes roughly 2m by 0.6 m by 0.3 m. (All these numbers are rough. We just don’t need better accuracy, as you will see.) We know from images released by the US government that two outer casings were shipped in each box. Since you cannot ship the rotors already in the centrifuge (it damages the ball bearing the rotor rests on; P-1 designs are assembled on site), there is probably another box with two rotors in it that was not shown for nonproliferation reasons. If we assume roughly the same size of box, that means that a standard shipping container (which is roughly 14.6 m by 2.5 m by 2.5 m) could carry, on average, 96 complete centrifuges.

2) How many centrifuges onboard a cargo ship? If you look at the port of Rajin, there is a bulk cargo ship at the only Port in North Korea that I have seen (see North Korea Economy Watch ) with port-based cranes whose below-decks storage area measures roughly 112 × 25 × 21 meters so it could fit 630 such cargo containers below decks. That means a grand total of 60,480 centrifuges could be carried onboard a single ship. Since, as Alex Glaser has shown in his wonderful paper Characteristics of the Gas Centrifuge for Uranium Enrichment and their Relevance for Nuclear Weapon Proliferation, Libya’s design for a “cascade interconnect” bomb factory needed only 5800 centrifuges to enrich over three bombs worth of weapons grade uranium from natural in a year. That would fit in about 61 cargo containers. Clearly, a single ship can pose a significant proliferation risk!

Tomorrow, we will consider some of these other questions.

Update (6 pm): The New York Times reports that the US will not board by force any ships sailing out of North Korea. That was clear from the wording of the resolution: “with the consent of the flag State.” I wonder how many, if any, ocean-going carrier vessels North Korea has. Does anyone know of a publicly available list of ship flagging? My guess would be nearly zero ships owned by the DPRK.

Comment [24]