Dudes from the Shig

Other voice 0:02

Hey Chuck, did you tie up the blimp? No, I thought you did. Oh my God!

Jeffrey Lewis 0:15

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of ArmsControlWonk.com and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California.

Aaron Stein 0:30

And I'm Aaron Stein. I'm a senior fellow at the Atlanta Council's Riffey Career Center for the Middle East and a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk blog. Hey, Aaron, we have new sanctions on Iran. That's right. They touch on North Korea, so it's a theme since I've come out of semi-retirement and off paternity leave.

Jeffrey 0:47

Yeah, well, there had been the notice that those sanctions were going to come down, I guess that was a couple of weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago. And obviously the administration delayed them so that they could get the prisoner swap done. Hostage swap? Prisoner swap? I don't know.

Aaron 1:08

I would say hostage swap, because our guys didn't really do anything, whereas their guys seemed to have been implicated in sanctions busting. Yeah. Well, that's why. Prisoners for hostages. Right. Prisoners for hostages. Right. At least they all came home safe. There was a big kerfuffle about why the administration waited a couple weeks ago because it was in response to a – I was kerfuffled.

I was too. I was pissed off. Kerfuffle isn't the right word.

Jeffrey 1:35

I thought they were waiting for after the election. It didn't occur to me – That they might have negotiations underway. Hey, you know who also it didn't occur to? Who? The guy who resigned his job at the State Department and gave all that information to the Huffington Post?

Aaron 1:57

Yeah, some guy looks pretty silly, doesn't he?

Jeffrey 2:00

I think that's got to be the worst feeling in the world, when you resign your job on a matter of principle, only to learn you weren't read into the fact that the government was doing precisely what you wanted.

Aaron 2:10

Right, the security clearance wasn't high enough to be involved in these hostage-for-prisoner negotiations. I've seen this happen a couple of times.

Jeffrey 2:20

I guess, I don't know, it's something I try to teach my students. It's fine to have matters of principle, but you also have to keep in mind that you may not know everything that's happening at any given time.

Aaron 2:33

Right. It's important to keep a paying job to keep food on the table.

Jeffrey 2:38

You only say that now because you have a baby.

Aaron 2:41

That's right. That's right. I can't resign in principle from anything.

Jeffrey 2:45

Me neither.

Aaron 2:46

A mortgage and kids. Right. But when the sanctions did come out, there was a little bit of a juicy nugget of information that they sort of tucked away towards the bottom of that little fact sheet.

Jeffrey 2:57

Yeah. I observe that this is happening a lot more lately. We used to have this thing called the 721 Report. Do you remember that?

Aaron 3:08

I don't.

Jeffrey 3:10

So the intelligence community would release a report that detailed the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction every six-month period. They would never release them on time, so you'd get them like 18 months late or something. But the administration, the Obama administration actually – Basically gave up on doing this. And I think there was a negotiation in order to reduce the amount of paperwork.

And so the 721 reports croaked, which stunk because that was a great source of information about proliferation because you could watch how language changed.

Other voice 3:55

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 3:56

And so that went away. And I notice now that the Treasury Department, in the last couple of sanctions releases, has started slipping in unclassified intelligence judgments. Right, right. Exactly. So this is like a new thing that they're doing.

Aaron 4:13

Right, because they use a special set of terms that have their own definitions that oftentimes lead to confusion when it comes to issues of WMD.

Jeffrey 4:22

Yeah, but it's great because it's this little source of – new source of official, unclassified intelligence judgments that then now the rest of us can go use.

Aaron 4:36

Exactly. And so this one – I like this one because it touches on a lot of the work that we both do and even a little bit of your OSINT work on a country we'll get into later. And it touches on Iran and North Korea. I mean, the two arms control wonk podcast staples.

Jeffrey 4:57

Yeah, yeah, our favorites, right? Right. I wrote two books about China, but I only podcast about Iran and North Korea.

Aaron 5:05

Yeah, seriously. Maybe the Chinese should start doing more so we can start talking about them.

Jeffrey 5:08

Oh, God, please, no. Not more.

Aaron 5:10

Not more. Anyways, for the listeners who haven't read.

Jeffrey 5:12

The world is already going to hell in a handbasket, Aaron.

Aaron 5:16

Yeah, seriously. But for the listeners who haven't read, do you want to tell them what we both saw and what we both started tweeting about?

Jeffrey 5:22

Well, the thing that really struck me was the open acknowledgement of the new 80-ton rocket booster that Iran is assisting North Korea in developing.

Aaron 5:38

Right. So, yeah, it confirms what we knew. I mean, what we already know, what's been reported on widely is that there's North Korean-Iranian collaborative work on missiles.

Jeffrey 5:52

Right. Well, and in 2013, someone I think at the Defense Intelligence Agency, although I'm not certain about that, leaked to Bill Gertz. Oral descriptions of several intelligence reports that described a series of meetings between Iranian officials and North Korean officials in Pyongyang, culminating in an October 2013 meeting where the Iranians It was unclear exactly what they agreed, but the Iranians were from Shahid Hamad Industrial Group, aka SHIG.

Yeah, which is in all of the requisite previous board reports about their nuclear activities. Well, yeah, it's the major manufacturer of their – well, it is the manufacturer of their liquid-fueled missiles.

Aaron 6:45

Right.

Jeffrey 6:46

So these dudes from the SHIG – I know, right? Dudes from the Shig were hanging out in Pyongyang, and someone leaked to Goertz that what they were discussing was Iranian participation in an 80-ton rocket booster, which would be pretty big. If that's a single stage, which is how I interpret that, the whole Taipodong-2 slash Unha is like 80 tons, sort of 70, 90 tons, hard to know for sure.

The Taepodong-2 slash Unha is like 70, 90 tons. So this would be a single stage that is as big as that, which means it's probably intended for a much larger ICBM or space launch vehicle. The thing is, when Gertz got that leak, it was pretty transparent that it was an effort to try to kill the nuclear negotiations with Iran.

In fact, the guy who leaked it to Goertz sort of even opined, why would you negotiate a nuclear deal with the Iranians when they're just signing this contract to develop this missile to deliver large nuclear warheads? Right. Apart from my kind of annoyed like, because I don't want them to have the nuclear warheads to put on the missile?

Like, there's that. But it also caused us, I think, all to be a little bit – Skeptical is not the right word, but obviously there was a purpose to the leak.

Aaron 8:29

Intellectually wary?

Jeffrey 8:31

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not surprising that the North Koreans and the Iranians would do that. In fact, it'd be kind of more surprising if they didn't. Right. But at the same time, when somebody's got a very specific axe to grind, you want to be careful with it.

Aaron 8:44

Right. But ultimately, it turns out to be true, at least according to the recent U.S. Treasury designation. So it gives some legs to the story that came out. I think it was 2013. Yeah.

Jeffrey 8:55

Yeah, I mean, I think what the Treasury designation does is it confirms that dudes from the Shig went to Pyongyang to negotiate Iranian participation in the development of an 80-ton booster, which is pretty interesting. I mean, it naturally raises the question, like, what is the thing?

Aaron 9:15

Right, I was going to ask you, what's it for?

Jeffrey 9:17

Yeah, I don't know. Also naturally raises the question, are we talking metric tons or what do we call them, English tons? Our tons? Our tons. Our tons. Our tons are their tons.

Aaron 9:29

Yeah.

Jeffrey 9:30

So I'll tell you how I think about it. Yeah. One of the things I mentioned in my book – am I one of those annoying people who cites my own books? Good God. One of the things I mentioned in my book is the Chinese had this really deliberate development pattern where basically they imported a – Soviet rocket.

They reverse engineered it. They kind of made it as big as they could, and that's basically the DF-2. Then they clustered engines, right? That's the DF-3. And then they stacked a rocket on top of that cluster of engines, and that's the DF-4. Tell our listeners why you would cluster. Oh, my God. Make it go farther.

Aaron 10:16

Make it go farther, right, to extend range without having to do major redesigns of your engine.

Jeffrey 10:20

Right. So you get an engine, and so your engine can throw the missile a certain distance. If you want to go further, you strap four of them together. And sometimes, by the way, you see that on old Soviet rockets. They're literally strapped together. You're right. But this is – in the case of the DF-3, you've got a single oxidizer tank and a single fuel tank and then four engines together.

And then in the DF-4, it's called staging, right? So you stack a missile on top of the cluster. Right. So they could throw it even farther. Right. So once they had mastered all those technologies, clustering and staging, they maxed it all out into the big honking DF-5 ICBM that we all know and love. The North Koreans have done pretty much the same thing.

And they've replicated that, which is they got Scud missiles from Egypt. They reverse engineered them. They built the biggest one they possibly could, which is the Nodong. And then the Unha, to me, looks exactly like a DF-4. Not that it's a copy of the DF-4, but it replicates those choices, which is the first stage is a cluster of nodong engines, and you stick a rocket on top.

Aaron 11:40

Yeah, exactly.

Jeffrey 11:41

Well, so the reason I think that's interesting is the Unha and the DF-4 are kind of about the same size. And that's because not, not because they're the same rocket, but because they represent the same kind of design approach of taking an existing medium range short or medium range ballistic missile, I guess, short range, you know, extending it to medium range, clustering the engines and sticking a rocket on top.

And it's like, well, okay. After the DF-4, like what did the Chinese build? They built the DF-5. So it's not that surprising to me that the North Koreans having built the Unha Are looking at now a much larger liquid-fueled ICBM.

Aaron 12:27

Or a space launch vehicle. Go ahead.

Jeffrey 12:30

Well, there are certain drawbacks to having such a big liquid-fueled ICBM, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to hang out in a North Korean silo.

Aaron 12:40

No, because it takes a long time to fuel.

Jeffrey 12:43

Yeah, so it may be that they're going to go down the KNO8 path for their ICBMs, and they're really only going to use this big, huge thing for space launches. But that's zero comfort to us, because we can't.

Aaron 12:59

There's no way that we could be assured of that. Right. And there are some overlaps with the Iranian approach to how they develop missiles as well.

Jeffrey 13:07

Yeah. Well, so, right, the North Koreans supplied the Iranians with their Scuds. And the Shahab-3 is a no-dong. And we have even seen the big – one of the Iranian space launchers. Looks a lot like an Unha. It's not a copy of an Unha, but it has the same… Developmental pattern. Yeah, same design philosophy.

Aaron 13:30

Of clustered engines.

Jeffrey 13:31

Yeah, and staged. I mean, everybody does clustered engines and staging, but it's… You know, they're not designing new rocket engines. It's like they're taking their existing rocket engine and they're clustering them and they're using that as the first stage for a larger missile. And so they're replicating the same kind of development choices.

Aaron 13:51

Right. And so bringing this back together, the Treasury designation and then the original Gertz report, now that you have more overt... Proof, let's say, of collaboration between the two on the next stage.

Jeffrey 14:03

Well, you have official confirmation. Right, official confirmation. We have the names of the people who were involved, and so it makes that – I mean, the thing with Goertz is you always have to be careful because he gets these great leaks, but he has a very strong point of view, and that causes – I think that causes him to not be as critical as he should be, but also because they're leaks – What's usually happening is someone reads a document, and then from the stories, it sounds like to me they're orally describing them.

And there's a lot of opportunity for error between reading a document and then orally describing it to a reporter who then types it up. And so while the Gertz story was plausible, actually getting an unclassified confirmation that yes, Iran and North Korea are working on this 80-ton booster is pretty useful.

Aaron 14:54

Yeah, and we learned a bit about how Iran and North Korea were going about evading detection of this and how they were using front companies in order to import, at least on the Iranian side, to import. Components of this and it sort of brings in like the North Korean missile export guys and a third country that you and I have talked about before, hinted at that we're going to talk about before but have never quite made around to doing it.

Jeffrey 15:19

Well, we're still working on the United Arab Emirates.

Aaron 15:25

Right. The UAE for listeners downstairs who has a history with both these guys, right?

Jeffrey 15:32

Yeah, you know, it's one of these really interesting things. So, I mean, I'll just – for listeners, I'll say we've been doing a lot of work on the UAE's history with COVID and North Korea because I think people don't realize that – although it was publicly reported and you see it sometimes mentioned, for whatever reason it hasn't – as you have discovered, Aaron, hasn't penetrated the popular mind – Yeah, well, the UAE imported Scud-B ballistic missiles from North Korea in the late 1980s and Scud-C ballistic missiles from North Korea in the late 1990s.

And the Clinton administration actually had to waive sanctions on the UAE for the 1999 purchase to let an arms sales go through. And somehow that never ended up in the press.

Aaron 16:19

I can imagine how it wouldn't, but I'm going to move on from that for just a minute. But you know – But it's the way – I mean one, it's no surprise that Iran uses front companies based out of Dubai or other parts of the Emirates to surreptitiously import things to avoid detection and controls. But there are – the fact that Khamid had set up shop in the Emirates raises some questions, right?

Yeah.

Jeffrey 16:47

My natural interest is in whether the United Arab Emirates is going to make the next logical purchase from North Korea. Having bought Scud B's in the late 80s and Scud C's in the late 1990s, I'm waiting for the UAE to buy no-dongs because that would be really useful in order to be able to target Tehran and other spots in Iran.

I'm just kind of waiting. And there have been, you know, lots of rumors. So there was, for example, if you look at the WikiLeaks cables, which you know, many people can't There was a comit official who tried to get a visa to go to the UAE in, I think it was 2008. It was 2008, yeah. And the US got really upset and demarched the UAE.

And in the course of those cables revealed that there had been a delegation from the UAE that went to Pyongyang in, I think, August 2008 on a missile shopping trip. And so as we have kind of – I mean I think one of the interesting things is we've kind of been looking around to see if there's evidence that such a purchase has been completed.

And the pushback I always got was, well, okay, there is this 2008 event, but that's a long time ago now. What is there that's more recent? And then we had this story by the New York Times. That one, ding, ding, ding. I remember when I read that one. Oh, yeah. I was in a hotel room in Turkey.

Yeah, where there's – where the UAE – a UAE company is arranging a $100 million arms purchase from Comid.

Other voice 18:25

Probably all –

Jeffrey 18:28

Small arms, light weapons and, and possibly intended for some of the UAE's friends, maybe in Yemen or Syria, but nonetheless you know an arms purchase relationship that violates sanctions that the U S apparently raised with the UAE. I find it interesting cause you know, as we were sort of asking around about whether the UAE might've bought no dongs from North Korea He got like a lot of...

I don't know what the right way to say this is. I'm surprised at the reaction I was getting for asking that question, given that the United States government was at the moment demarshing the UAE for a $100 billion arms purchase from ComEd. It doesn't seem like it's so unreasonable to imagine that they might buy no dongs if they're having that kind of relationship.

And then this latest round of sanctions has – it's one UAE firm, right? That is serving as a front company to help the Iranians and apparently North Koreans with equipment for missile testing. See, the thing I find so interesting about this, Aaron, but as a Middle East watcher, it's probably less weird to you. North Korea is assisting Iran's missile program, and that's something that is of great concern to the UAE and is, I suspect, part and parcel of why the UAE themselves went to North Korea to buy their own missiles.

But then this leads to this kind of relationship where there are entities in the UAE, presumably with the knowledge of The government that are helping North Korea do business, which means helping the UAE's adversaries. Is adversary the right word? But helping Iran and the Syrian government in Yemen. You know, those are places that the UAE is not happy with what Iran is doing.

And those are places that are ending up with missiles from North Korea, which in some ways these UAE entities are assisting. It's very...

Aaron 20:52

It's very interesting to me. In the Middle East, nothing is black and white. You have allegiances and alliances that are obviously in place, but they get very gray over certain issues. The Emirati government has been, let's say, pretty hands-off in their enforcement of middlemen companies that have been involved in Iran's procurement network. I mean, that we know about very overtly.

And, I mean, you would think it has something to do with the large Iranian population in Dubai and the amount of trade and business that goes back and forth between the two countries. You can't crack down too hard, otherwise you risk a lucrative part of their economy. But on the other hand, by not cracking down too hard, you're indirectly supporting Iran's ability to import equipment for missile testing, in this case for an 80-ton booster.

Jeffrey 21:40

Yeah, it isn't actually clear to me from the Treasury release if the equipment is for the 80-ton booster or not. I really went through this. It's a really interesting press release because there are several Iranians designated. And one example, and I'm just looking at these documents, it's so hard to read between the lines. You know, there's a paragraph where three dudes from the Shig get designated.

And two of them in this paragraph are described as being designated – well, they're listed – they're designated – Because of their role in Iran's program. And then two of them are identified as being participants in this other program, you know, the 80-ton booster. And so you read it, and so it's like, well, are all three involved in the 80-ton booster program?

Like, why are they grouped together in a paragraph? Or is it only really the two that are named? You know, there's an enormous amount of... Well, I still have a lot of questions about... What the Treasury Department is trying to say.

Aaron 22:56

Do you have a hypothesis?

Jeffrey 22:59

No. No, I don't. I mean, I think the best I can do is I think that they want to designate people from the SHIG They see the Shig being involved in this 80-ton booster, which makes sense because they're the liquid fuel makers, and this thing is apparently liquid-fueled. I think it's useful to designate Iranian entities right now.

I think the Iranians were conducting missile tests in order to make the point that the Iran deal doesn't cover missiles, which we kind of know it doesn't, but Even though we know it doesn't, there are a lot of people who wish it did, and so they kind of assert that it does. And so I think the Iranians were doing tests to make it absolutely clear it doesn't cover it.

And so I thought it was important that we sanction entities to make it absolutely clear that not only does it not cover it, but we are not prohibited from trying to enforce missile nonproliferation.

Aaron 24:00

That is in the JCPOA. What is? Oh, that we can't redesignate? That we can't redesignate and that basically the missile sanctions that are in place will remain. Oh, well, so there are two pieces to that.

Jeffrey 24:13

There are the UN missile sanctions that will remain for, oh gosh, eight years. I can never remember. I know the arms embargo is five and the missile related are eight years. I think every time we've done this, I've transposed those in my brain. They could be flipped. All right. So that's one thing is that the missile-related sanctions remain.

But those sanctions are drawn off the missile technology control regime. Right. And Iran is still outside of that regime. Exactly. And so while the UN doesn't have sanctions, it's still absolutely the case that MTCR members are – What's the right word? Strongly presumed to deny those technologies to the Iranians. So I guess those aren't technically sanctions, but there is a supplier's cartel that they're outside of and that they're excluded from.

Now whether the... Whether the Russians enforce that or not, that's a whole other ball of wax. But then the second thing is you know, the, the, there's that whole passage in the Iran deal about not redesignating entities, which makes sense. Like I understand why the Iranians would want language that says like, you can't just, you can't lift all these sanctions and then immediately reimpose them.

Right. Like I get it because you're training sanctions relief for these restraints on their program. And so you, You can't just swap them. But at the same time, the administration has said, and they have to say this, if the Iranians do awful things that violate other UN Security Council resolutions, like, I don't know, helping North Korea develop ballistic missiles, we ought to be able to sanction them for that behavior.

So from my perspective, fine, the Iranians are testing to illustrate the point that the JCPOA doesn't constrain their missile program. But I think we should sanction them to indicate the JCPOA doesn't stop us from sanctioning their missile program.

Aaron 26:20

Yeah, I think that's right. That's why I was upset when the sanctions were pushed. But now I get it because they were tied to something else. And that something else was more important than waiting three weeks to put these guys on – to designate these guys.

Jeffrey 26:34

Yeah, I think three weeks of extra travel time for the dudes from the SIG, well worth getting those people home.

Aaron 26:44

Yeah, I think they could eat more good food in North Korea. I mean, before they go on the Treasury designation list.

Jeffrey 26:52

Yeah. Well, you know, one of the big questions I always have is, I think it's really interesting. On the one hand, you want to designate all these guys, right? But on the other hand, since they're traveling on government business, the government can always give them a fake passport.

Aaron 27:12

Yeah, and North Korea is not going to enforce the U.S. sanctions.

Jeffrey 27:15

Right. And so maybe they have to transit or whatever, but there's kind of limited value to designating them as individuals. But more importantly, and you kind of got a hint of this from the Al Jazeera article, Which were appalling because they didn't fully redact the guy's name. But when these comid guys come out to sell, that's a real opportunity for the international intelligence community to make them offers.

Aaron 27:48

Right, to figure out what – exactly. Yeah. A, you can get your hand on some North Korean missile swag for intelligence purposes. Then you could also learn about their procurement network and how they go to disrupt it.

Jeffrey 28:01

Right. Well, the Al Jazeera leak, which I thought was really interesting.

Aaron 28:05

Also has UAE in it.

Jeffrey 28:07

Well, maybe. But remember, it was a comid guy who was transiting the Republic of South Africa, presumably given what kind of flights that airport accommodates, presumably to sell missiles or other comid goods in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa. So, you know, like – You got the guy in the transit lounge. He's traveling by himself. There's no North Korean surveillance.

Do you think he wears the pin? Yeah, sure. Why take the pin off? When these guys come out, I can see it's a real opportunity to see if you can pitch them.

Aaron 28:59

Right.

Jeffrey 29:00

So I've always wondered like that must be a fascinating decision. Like you don't want to designate everybody that you know about except for the people who have agreed to spy for you because that would be obvious. Right.

Aaron 29:15

Cause a little problem back home.

Jeffrey 29:19

Yeah, right. It's like, ah, Mr. Kim, why is it that you're always allowed to travel? Right. How come I have to keep getting a new fake name? But on the other hand, you don't want to let these guys run around freely. So that must be pretty interesting. Once you know a guy's name, and actually even if he's not spying for you, once you know his name, it must be really tempting to just let them do business so you can watch where they go.

Aaron 29:51

Yeah, I mean, of course. I mean, it's difficult, right? Excuse me. It's difficult because you also have to be shown, at least on the U.S. side, to be doing something, right? The added pressure on the policy community is to show that you're standing up to the Iranians for their testing of their missiles. And so these treasury designations are also, besides being a very useful thing, it can become, politics can be interjected into that debate.

Jeffrey 30:18

Oh, yeah. I always, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think I was early on about when the con network started to unravel. It sounded to me, and it's never been exactly clear because not all this stuff has been declassified, but it sounded to me like the U.S. intelligence community at a certain point had a very good handle on the network, but kind of let it run.

You know, just to see who was buying. And I think I would kind of joke at the time that, you know, that the IC would be totally content to just sit back and just watch as everybody built nuclear weapons. I think that's not fully fair, but I mean, it must be really... I guess you see this sometimes when there are sting operations for drug gangs.

Once you've got something thoroughly penetrated, I guess it's probably pretty hard to shut it all down, arrest everybody, and then have to start over from square one with the next group of bad guys.

Aaron 31:31

Yeah, or you negotiate a large international agreement that limits and constrains you for 25 years. I'm assuming that we were at that point with the Iranians, but that's just me. But anyways, what's the bigger picture here as we wrap up? So why should we care?

Jeffrey 31:49

Well, maybe we shouldn't. Maybe we should just be – Blase about – just happy moving on? Totally sanguine about like the collapse of the missile nonproliferation regime. No, I think – I'm being flip – One article that I'm thinking about writing is something that looks at missile proliferation, because the way that we constrain missile proliferation is we have this thing called the missile technology control regime, which is a supplier's cartel.

But there's a huge problem with it, which is that it's not that hard for countries to develop these capabilities indigenously, right? So the MTCR has gotten pretty big. And we're now at the point where we don't want to let the Chinese in it. Although the Chinese adhere to it, which is like a great deal for us. But the Iranians and the North Koreans are outside of it.

And so it's sort of useful to constrain the Iranians and the North Koreans. But it's totally useless in the sense of stopping the Iranians and North Koreans from selling the stuff that... That they've already developed. And so while I think the missile technology control regime is still useful, it's kind of useful only for those two cases of Iran and North Korea.

And I get the strong sense that it's going to kind of fail over time. And once the North Koreans and the Iranians are fully kitted out on the missile side, then you'll have these – Fully capable proliferators on the outside. And I think the tendency on our side will be to start and or continue making sales that violate it.

And I think we've seen a little bit of that with the Europeans who've sold storm shadow cruise missiles to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. So I'm kind of down about – I think – I don't know. I'm kind of imagining that the missile technology control regime – I mean, we're sort of trying to let it fail slowly and safely.

Aaron 34:11

I think that's right. It's getting more and more difficult because – Even with like unmanned vehicles, because they're so similar to cruise missiles, and the the range designations and payload designations are so hard to control, and it's just not all that difficult any longer to to develop these technologies, as you were saying. I mean, I think Dennis Gormley, you know, the guy we talk about all the time on the show, you know you know, made the point in his book, Missile Contagion, is that you know, just simple guidance used to be, and and and.

Cruise missile engines, for example, used to be only capable of being produced in the United States and Russia, but that's subsequently spread all over the globe because of the failure of proliferation effort, but just because manufacturing has improved all over the world. It's just not that hard to do.

Jeffrey 34:57

Well, right. Not to run back to Northeast Asia, but to me it's a really strange situation we have where it's still kind of controversial to talk about selling conventionally armed cruise missiles to the Japanese, which is weird because the Chinese have conventionally armed long-range cruise missiles and the South Koreans and the Taiwanese have developed their own conventionally armed long-range cruise missiles.

The North Koreans have built not so much impressive in the way of cruise missiles yet, but plenty of ballistic missiles. It's sort of like there's a huge missile race underway in Asia.

Aaron 35:37

We're looking at the Japanese like, now don't you go join. Well, we're on the precipice of one in the Middle East as well. Right.

Jeffrey 35:42

Well, that's why I kind of jumped back. It's like I look at the ballistic missile proliferation that I see in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Syria, Yemen, and it's kind of like maybe a little too late. I mean I think we have this op-ed – Expectation that I'm going to explain a problem really nicely and then I'll give you five paragraphs and the fifth paragraph is the simple, easy answer for how to fix the problem.

Aaron 36:20

We just might be screwed. I think we need to wrap up here because we're going on a little too long here. This is something I've really been wanting to do myself. We contribute to it. We, the United States, in our efforts to Combat missile proliferation, we sell missile defense all over the Gulf states, for example, or Southeast Asia, it doesn't matter.

And it's very attractive to try and defeat missile defense with more missiles, or cruise missiles for that matter, to hit, to target anti-missile systems. Well, and I know you're desperate to wrap up.

Jeffrey 36:59

I've got one more complication. And I'm not against selling missile defenses. Me neither. But you're right. They do have this problem of the obvious solution to missile defenses is to have more missiles. But also, which is another thing people rarely talk about, missile defense interceptors make excellent missiles.

Aaron 37:24

Right.

Jeffrey 37:25

Yeah.

Aaron 37:26

Don't bring up the INF. Don't. Yeah.

Jeffrey 37:31

I won't, but it's worth noting that at least one Iranian short-range ballistic missile, which I'm pretty sure has been transferred to Syria, is a Chinese surface-to-air missile that the Chinese converted and sold. And I actually had a student do a project looking at the S-300 that the Russians are selling abroad. It's a very nice surface-to-air missile. What would that be like as a surface-to-surface missile?

And I think... It's not so much that I'm worried straight up about conversions. But again, you know, we have this idea that we're going to use export controls in order to constrain the spread of these technologies. But they're, you know, those technologies, whether they are, you know, jet engines that you can use in a cruise missile, or whether they are rocket engines that you acquire in a service air missile that you can then, you know, reverse engineer, like those technologies are out there.

Aaron 38:29

Absolutely. And then the guidance to make them extremely accurate, or at least fairly accurate, is also out there as well.

Jeffrey 38:37

Yeah. Oh, man. I have often been thinking about doing this as a project. Just your cell phone. Think about how good your tiny little cell phone is about knowing where it is. Yeah. Yeah. Now, admittedly, it's taking advantage of some things that... May not necessarily be applicable in a missile environment, but it's a pretty small device to be a pretty fancy guidance package.

Yeah, so, yeah. God, doom and gloom here.

Aaron 39:07

Missile proliferation is coming. We don't have any solution for it, except for it's happening. We better manage it. I didn't sleep much last night because of the kids, so you got the grumpy me. Is that like an indirect plug for the Missile Defense Agency? No, no. I didn't think so. I just had to have you say it on board.

Jeffrey 39:28

Well, they do almost no cruise missile defense.

Aaron 39:31

I know. And J-Lens went rogue. Oh, God.

Jeffrey 39:38

It's an important capability that seems to be deployed in the most self-defeating fashion I can possibly imagine.

Aaron 39:47

Let's just get the tether right. Anyways.

Other voice 39:52

Hey Chuck, did you tie up the blimp? I thought you did. Oh my God.

Aaron 40:00

Okay. We've gone way off topic, but so anyways just, just, just exactly. So I, I think you have alien and this is where I think we should wrap up. It goes back to the previous two conversations we had about North Korea. And I think we should include Iran in that now too, is that you have a, a, You have developmental programs of nasty things going on in the DPRK.

And you had developmental programs of nasty things going on in Iran. The nuclear thing, I think, has been pretty well covered and addressed in our previous podcast. But the missile thing is something that we're still going to have to keep an eye out for. Because it's outside of the MTCR, and we talked about the challenges to that.

It's relatively unrestrained in how they can continue to push forward with it.

Jeffrey 40:46

I'm trying not to say we're screwed, Aaron.

Aaron 40:47

No, we're screwed. We're going to end there because the more we keep going, it just gets gloomier and gloomier. So thanks for listening. You're screwed. We're screwed. Thanks, everybody.