Kim Jong Un’s Bomb

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

Kim Jong-un posed with a nuclear weapon. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and verification. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:26

And I'm Aaron Stein. I'm a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk blog. I'm the senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East. Hey, Aaron. Hey, Jeffrey. It's been a long time. I know. Mostly my fault this time. Yeah, previously it was my fault, but I think this time it was decidedly your fault.

Yeah, I was to blame. But interesting things are afoot. I know, I know. All about North Korea. I think this is the year of North Korea.

Jeffrey 0:54

Oh, God. I actually was talking to Michael Krapon the other day, and I have a really long overdue paper. And I promised him that I would get it to him in its final form tomorrow. And the proviso I said is, as long as Kim Jong-un doesn't do anything crazy.

Aaron 1:13

The last time we talked, which was a while ago, you said that you had YouTube and email alerts set up. I mean, they must have gone absolutely berserk a couple of days ago.

Jeffrey 1:23

They have just been going berserk. I mean, we went from the nuclear tests to the space launch to To now this. And what do we call this? The Full Monty.

Aaron 1:38

Oh, my goodness. It's the Full Monty.

Jeffrey 1:41

Oh, boy. You know, in the universe of wonk porn, where all is laid bare before you with nothing left to the imagination.

Aaron 1:50

This is the most X-rated of wonk porn. I mean, there's nothing left to the imagination.

Jeffrey 1:56

Yeah, I think so. I mean, there are... I guess I've seen maybe very early shots of Fat Man that are like this. But in this case, Fat Man's not the bomb.

Aaron 2:16

Well, Fat Man is standing behind Fat Man, but little Fat Man.

Jeffrey 2:21

Yeah, Batman is standing behind a miniaturized – well, I wouldn't call it miniaturized. I would say a compact, probably boosted fission device.

Aaron 2:30

Well, now our listeners, they think that we're talking about Chatsworth in the Valley or they're onto it. So describe to those who don't know what we're talking about.

Jeffrey 2:40

Kim Jong-un posed with a nuclear weapon. We saw everything, everything. You know what my favorite part about this whole conversation has been? What? Well, I have noticed that there is this incredible reluctance to believe that the North Koreans have actually developed nuclear weapons. So every time the North does a nuclear test, I have some South Korean reporter asking me, well, is it possible that they just filled a mountain with conventional explosives?

And what do you step back from it? It's like, oh, wow, they've done four nuclear tests. Three times they have paraded road mobile ICBMs down the streets of Pyongyang. They put up a map of the United States with targets on it that said mainland strike plan. And now Kim Jong-un is standing in front of, it's probably a mock-up, but nonetheless, of a nuclear weapon.

And people are like, what message do you think they're trying to send to us? Right. Like, what do you think they're saying?

Aaron 3:43

It seems pretty freaking clear to me. This is the most detailed... Picture of a nuclear weapon I've ever seen.

Jeffrey 3:52

Well, you get some older pictures.

Aaron 3:55

With the caveat that it was not from the 1950s. From the 1960s.

Jeffrey 4:01

Well, and sometimes when you see pictures of ours that show up, they're in these cases, and so you don't really see much of anything. But yeah, this is really something. Although, I guess we should start by talking about the missiles, because in fact... This is a visit to a missile plant.

Aaron 4:20

Right, so I've called it the visit, and I have no idea where he visited.

Jeffrey 4:25

Yeah, well, okay, so he's in a windowless building that may even be underground. So where one has to infer, but North Korea has a North Korea has a missile plant. Oh, gosh, we're going to arms control wonk with foreign names again, aren't we?

Aaron 4:44

Chomjin? Chomjin. I like Chomjin. That sounds good to me.

Jeffrey 4:50

Yeah. There is... There is a long-identified North Korean missile plant that's well-known. That's the place that they take visitors who are on shopping expeditions. A couple of years ago, there was a picture that popped up of what I think is a nodong in one of the underground halls, sort of against a wall for the shoppers to peruse.

Yeah. And while everyone's focused on the nuclear weapon, what Kim really did is he went into a big room where there were a whole bunch of missiles lined up. So there were the K-08s, the ICBM that got paraded. There was both the kind of what we've been calling the K-08 Mod 1, the old version, and then also what we've been calling the Mod 2, which is the kind of newer version.

It's got a significantly altered upper section. But also it looks like there are some unpainted nodongs in the room. So he's really – he's got this sort of fantastic spread of missiles before him. But one of the missiles has the front section pulled off. Right, the nose cone. Yeah, and it shows a nose cone we've never seen before.

Right, with a kind of funny shape that looks like the reentry body for maybe an old Polaris missile. Yeah, absolutely. That's a good way to describe it. And you can see, you can look in the back so you can see the payload space in the middle of it. Yeah, yeah. And then on a table right there is this spherical object.

With cables running into it. Spherical objects that have cables.

Aaron 6:40

Yeah, you want to know what my favorite part about this picture is? What? The little red tablecloth that they have on the table. So not only do they want you to see it, they attract your eye with the red chintzy tablecloth on the physics package.

Jeffrey 6:59

I don't want to get too far afield, but for the longest time, we made fun of every time that one of their fighter aircraft was shown. Right. The pilots have these little doilies. Right, on the headrest. Right. And so we were making fun of them, and then the British released an image of a trident firing. Oh, I remember that.

And the captain's chair had this, like, chintz floral pattern on it.

Aaron 7:27

I remember this. It sort of vaguely looked like it was camo floral.

Jeffrey 7:33

Yeah. So we make fun of the North Koreans. But we should talk about the missiles because one thing that's not getting any reportage are two things that we now know about the KNO8 series, which we did not know before. One is that there is a partial shot of the bottom of the missile where the exhaust chambers are.

Aaron 7:57

Oh, this is like full-on wonk porn.

Jeffrey 7:59

Yeah, yeah. Well, so we had this question about like – so from the side, it's just a tube, but you want to know like how many engines are inside it.

Aaron 8:05

So the Unha, the space launch vehicle, which now is the Kwong Myung Song, which is not again Korean. The K word.

Jeffrey 8:13

Mm-hmm. Right. Anyway, so the Taepodong-2, that thing has four Nodong engines, right, in a cluster. Right. And this thing is not that big. And so it couldn't accommodate four. So we always wondered what was in there. And you can sort of, you know, it's not a totally clear shot. But our best guess is that we're now pretty sure that the K-08, the first stage, has two Nodong engines.

Right.

Aaron 8:41

Well, so what does that tell you?

Jeffrey 8:42

Well, it, it allows, it's, it allows us to much more accurately model the performance of the missile.

Aaron 8:48

Right.

Jeffrey 8:48

It should bring the range down a little bit. You know, but it gives us reason to kind of fool around with, with some of the models. But I think the first stage is two no dong engines, which is kind of, kind of interesting. The second thing is the reentry body. When the North Koreans paraded the KNO-8s, they had those funny little nose cones.

Everybody kind of laughed at those funny little nose cones. The high-resolution photographs showed that maybe they were dummy nose cones. There might have even been wood that had been painted. So everybody kind of laughed at the North Koreans. But this time they're displaying something that is the appropriate shape. And it looks real. And so my guess is that back when they paraded them, they either did not have or did not feel like sharing the precise configuration.

Right.

Aaron 9:47

So either or. I mean, either they didn't want people like you to take a look at it and draw inferences or intel agencies or didn't have it. We don't actually know.

Jeffrey 9:57

Yeah, well, if they didn't want people to draw inferences, they've changed their freaking mind. That was what I was about to say. That was then, this is now.

Aaron 10:04

Again, I'm looking at the photos. I just have them up on my computer. There's nothing subtle about it. It's just unbelievable to me. Again, besides the physics package, he also has the, speaking of the nose cone, behind him in one of the pictures, he has a little drawing. Yes, there's a time supposed to work.

Jeffrey 10:28

Yeah. And I think it's a little hard to tell. But, you know, we're going to have to go through all the pictures really carefully. So, you know, I feel bad for listeners. You know, you're getting the good news is you're getting my nearly unvarnished first impressions. The bad news is my unvarnished first impressions can be wrong.

Aaron 10:49

It's true, but that's why we'll have to refresh the Arms Control Wong blog every so often just to make sure that we stay up to date on the eventual analysis that gets published.

Jeffrey 11:00

Have I become one of those horrible reporters who's willing to say anything and then just looks like, well, if it's wrong, I get a second story out of it? Yeah, why not?

Aaron 11:08

No, of course not. This was too good to pass up.

Jeffrey 11:11

We couldn't sit on this. No, it's true. And I guess – I mean I will say this. This is an invitation to listeners, right? People should look at these photographs because there are so, so many details. One of the things that we're starting to do now is to try to count all the cables running in. The cables are in bundles and they – They go into a series of places in the casing, but presumably each of those cables then goes to a detonator.

And so I'm wondering if maybe we'll be able to count the detonators, which would tell us something about the design, which is rather slim.

Aaron 11:53

It's small. What you can see in the detonators is that it's reminiscent of Fat Man, but it's far smaller, and there's far fewer cables. And it's, again, pictured right in front of a missile nose cone, so they're clearly signaling that they have the capability to miniaturize it, or at least have it be carried by a ballistic missile.

And two, it can give you something about what we think the pit or the core looks like.

Jeffrey 12:20

Yeah, you know, so I have been writing the same article for like five years now, and it never ceases to amaze me that no one has ever read this article, even though I keep republishing it. I've read it. I know you have, but I'm teasing a little bit. But, you know, we have this idea that everybody's first nuclear weapon has to be Batman.

And that it has to be this giant implosion device that could never fit on a missile. But While that was how all of the people who are NPT weapon States did it before 1970, like no one has ever done that again.

Aaron 12:57

And we don't know what the early designs of their stuff look like.

Jeffrey 13:02

Well, it's sort of, it started to leak out. So, you know, we know the, okay, the South Africans did a gun type device.

Aaron 13:08

So that's a, that's a kind of special one-off.

Jeffrey 13:11

But Sweden Sweden planned to do a compact, aspherical fission device that would have only been like 35 centimeters in diameter. Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. The first one they were going to test was small. And the Pakistanis got the Chinese device, right, that was the fourth CHIC-4, Chinese Communist Nuclear Test-4. And they pretty quickly – Miniaturize that and the so that the the design they got from china ended up in libya but a smaller design that was something like probably it's it was reported in a really unclear way but i i believe that the second design that showed up in switzerland in the possession of the tinners which was the more miniaturized pakistani design was like 60 centimeters and you know 200, 300 kilograms.

Aaron 14:11

I think that's similar to what we know about the reported Iran design.

Jeffrey 14:15

Yes. And that's what Danilenko was reportedly doing in Iran. And we have the Iraqi... Dimensions. Do you remember a couple of years ago when, I think this is Duncan Hunter, one of these crazy members of Congress had this idea that they were going to put all of the captured WMD documents online so people could crowdsource them and prove that the WMD went to Syria?

Do you remember this?

Aaron 14:48

I actually don't, but that sounds like the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life.

Jeffrey 14:52

Well, especially since lots of those documents, which didn't prove the WMD went to Syria, but lots of those documents had classified nuclear weapons design information in them.

Aaron 15:02

For us, we would have loved it.

Jeffrey 15:04

Yeah, well, one of the documents that went up online and then got taken down – I'm not going to comment on who may have copies of that document. But one of them that was put online and taken down showed that the Iraqi design was 80 centimeters in diameter and weighed 900 kilograms. And so, you know, everybody... After the five nuclear powers, Iraq and Pakistan and Sweden and Iran, all, and I think this is true of North Korea, I'll say that in a second, they all went straight to something that, I wouldn't call them miniaturized, I would call them compact.

Smaller nuclear designs that take advantage of the fact that they know a fat man device would work. And so it's more interesting to spend your first test on something a little fancier. So why do we assume that everybody is going to test a – I mean literally no one has tested a Fat Man device since China in 1964.

Yeah.

Aaron 16:04

I mean that's true. I mean that's a good point and I think it speaks to – Oh, I take that back. I take that back.

Jeffrey 16:13

The Indian device in 1974 was pretty big. Yeah. But that's it. That's the last time somebody has done that.

Aaron 16:19

Yeah. Well – Well, we don't know if the South Africans ever tested, but they developed two types of systems. It was a gun device. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But... Anyways, I mean we're getting off into something different.

Jeffrey 16:33

Well, no. So the reason I was going to bring this back is to say – so people are looking at this ball in front of Fat Man. It's too delicious. People are looking at Compact Man sitting next to Fat Man.

Aaron 16:52

Right.

Jeffrey 16:55

And people are looking at Compact Man and they're saying like, well, I think it's too small. But like it's sort of between – it's sort of like what the Pakistanis moved on to and a little better than what the Iraqis did and not quite as fancy as what the Swedes tried to do. So I don't see why it's so hard to believe.

And then there is the issue of the defector.

Aaron 17:25

Oh, I see. I don't actually know this story about the defector, and I'm not even just doing that for the podcast.

Jeffrey 17:30

Oh, this is a great story. And this is a wonderful story that's like how Jeffrey came to be not such a jerk. Okay. So a couple of years ago – no, not a couple. Ten years ago now. It feels like a couple of years ago, but it was ten years ago. This North Korean defect, and he gets a – A pseudonym, right?

So he's known as Kim Il-do. I don't know. For all I know, that's funny in Korean, but I don't. But he allegedly worked for the Second Economic Committee, right, which is basically the bomb and missile program. And he said a couple of things that were really interesting. He said that North Korea's new – and this is – oh, sorry, I should say this is before the first test in 2006 – Right.

So this is in 2005. So at this point, we've never seen any have no hints about what their nuclear weapons look like. And so he starts off by saying, well, OK, it's a one ton nuclear warhead, which is a thousand kilograms, which even though a thousand kilograms sounds like a lot, that's that's a compact device. Right. You could you could probably slap that on a no dong or at least you're close.

So it's one thousand kilograms and only had four kilograms of plutonium, which is really small. Yeah. And then he said that they – and what's really interesting is that while the weapon is reported to be functional, the scientists have doubts about the level of performance. And at the time I thought, this guy is insane. Like what is he talking about?

But then when they did the test in 2006 – So what if he's telling the truth? What if they did exactly what the U.S. intelligence community said would be a mistake? The U.S. intelligence community used to say you could build something that weighed like 1,000 kilograms without testing, but it would be unreliable. So that was it, right?

It was unreliable. They tried to go straight to a compact device, and the first one didn't work because – That's unreliable. And he said, Kim further said, North Korea is not confident whether their large-sized nuclear weapons can work in practice, and they're developing a smaller 500-kilogram version. So my guess has always been that they, after that first test failed, turned around and tested, took that data about what didn't go right, made whatever improvements they felt like they needed to make, and they've been working to this smaller, maybe the second test was like 500 kilograms, right?

Yeah. So it would not be at all surprising to me that for nuclear tests in. Right. That they would be showing off a device that looks like what we've been told the Pakistani device looks like. Right. It's like 60 centimeters in diameter and weighs, you know, a couple hundred kilograms. Yeah. Like it to me. I'm sorry. This is like why why Jeffrey feels like an idiot.

I thought Kim was full of it when I read that thing for the first time. Right. And and now I think Kim was absolutely telling the truth. And like if I had only paid attention, I think I would have understood the evolution of their program. So it's not at all surprising me. The first one didn't work because they were trying to make a compact device.

And now four tests in. I, you know, I am. Totally persuaded that they have built a compact, probably boosted fission device and that that's what they are showing off right now.

Aaron 20:54

As somebody who wrote his PhD dissertation on Iran's nuclear program, when I first saw the pictures, my mind flashed to Danilenko, just like you said. 70 centimeter diameter You know, small EBWs and just a limited number and that design. And it just looks about right to me. You know, that's what it should look like. Because I tried to model it once, but I'm no wizard like your shop over there.

So I could never quite do it myself. But just based upon the open source, what it looked like. And that's what it looks like. Right there in front of that picture that you just talked about. So maybe the defector was telling the truth.

Jeffrey 21:26

Yeah, it's a shame I've never seen a picture of the R-265 implosion. I've heard it exists.

Aaron 21:34

A picture? I've heard that there is a random patent floating around inside Russia, and it exists. And so it's been my life mission to find it, but I can't. To find a picture of the— To find the picture of the patent.

Jeffrey 21:45

Oh, man. Yeah, that's good. That would be worth doing, right?

Aaron 21:51

I sat in the Russian archives with a Russian speaker for like four hours one day just going through. I'm not joking. Now, isn't that the worst feeling when you never find something? Yeah, I really did look hard. They couldn't find it, but apparently it exists.

Jeffrey 22:03

I had an experience like that the other day where I went to the Naval Postgraduate School to get a high-resolution picture of a Chinese missile that had been published in Beijing Review. Yeah. And after I carefully sifted through everything and finally found the thing, some mother flipper had cut the page out. Oh, no. So that he or she, although it doesn't really sound like something like irritating, you know, missile-borne dude, so that he could have, right, the high-resolution version.

Are you sure it wasn't somebody on your team, like Schmurler? Oh, Schmurler. Schmurler. I would kill Schmurler if Schmurler did that. I can't joke about that. That's a trigger warning or something. But yeah, I would be very angry if Schmurler cut it out. That was a joke. But yeah, to go back, yeah, I would love to see a picture of the Dan Alenko implosion rig.

Aaron 23:05

Yeah, absolutely. Or if not, something similar that they could have gotten from their own You know, I mean, something, you know, just whatever they're using as their implosion driver inside that device. But you can get a sense of what it looks like and then you can start to make inferences, again, about, you say it's miniaturized and you had a discussion on Twitter about what you think the composition of the pit is.

Jeffrey 23:28

Oh, yeah. So, you know, one of the things that's really interesting to me is, and this is one of those annoying things I do, people probably hate it, but we've always assumed that, like, At first, they were testing plutonium, and then they got this HEU, and then they were testing HEU, right? And so the question we ask is, which of the tests used HEU?

Yeah, that's one I always wonder. I always wonder what it is. Well, so we actually have one other historical case of a country that started using one fissile material type and switched over, right? And that was China. A case I know painfully well. And China started with HEU and then switched over to plutonium when it became available because they wanted to go fast and get tests in the books.

And then once the plutonium became available, they started to switch over from HEU to plutonium. They didn't stop testing uranium devices. They integrated larger amounts of plutonium into their existing devices. OK, explain that to the listeners. So those are called composite pits. Right. So the pit had both HEU and plutonium in it. And they gradually, and it's not clear to me how gradually, some of this radiochemistry data is available on an open source basis, but you have to be a radiochemist.

Aaron 24:49

That's when you start sending out furious emails to somebody to help you out.

Jeffrey 24:52

I have tried to persuade three different radiochemists to take a look at this data, and no one will bite. Because it's long, and it's boring, and you're probably only going to learn what we already know. It's just that you would know it in exquisite detail. You'd be able to tell exactly how much material was in each device.

So the Chinese started switching over at the same time that they were trying to miniaturize the devices and at the same time that they were introducing boosting techniques. And so when I look at this last test, which they claim was a thermonuclear device or a hydrogen bomb, which I think that probably means a boosted device since deuterium and tritium are isotopes of hydrogen, I think of the 12th Chinese nuclear test.

And 12 seems like a lot, right? But it actually wasn't a lot because they were switching over. And they did the H-bomb first, and then they came back and did boosting, right? But the 12th test was, I think, two kilograms of plutonium, half a kilogram of HEU, and boost gas. And they got, you know, they got like 20 kilotons out of the thing.

Aaron 26:01

That's interesting. By the way, I think you're the only person I know that knows what the 12th Chinese nuclear test was.

Jeffrey 26:07

I could almost walk you through like the first 20. I know I can do the first 12 from memory and I can do like the last – I could do almost all of them, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's my – It's your job. Cut my teeth. I'm the Chinese nuclear person. I get you. I have to tell you about the time I interviewed a very senior Chinese nuclear weapons figure and he was – Really generous with his time and was answering a lot of my questions, and, but I was doing like really annoying things like from memory going like, okay, now in 1972 the 13th test, you know, and he is just looking at me like, kid, this guy, go away. No, well, no, he was happy to answer things, but he was like, I'm old and that was a long time ago, and I don't, for the life of me, like, I'd.

Barely remember, you know. And actually, I've said I'm doing it off time. I actually was 13 in 1972. I should actually look that up. I could be wrong about that. Anyway, anyway but the 12th test, that was definitely, I, I think that's a really great model for what the North Koreans. Oh, I shouldn't say great model because I don't know if it's true, but that is my mental model for what the North Koreans are doing. And what's the benefit the North Koreans get out of this for these composite pits, assuming that's what they used?

Well, a couple of things. Ah, 13th test was 1972. What did I say? I said 72, didn't I? You did. Yes. I was doing that from memory. It's always a little frightening. You get a couple of things from it. One thing is it makes your fissile material go further. You know, like let's say you've got a tiny amount of plutonium.

You can stretch it further if you sub it out with some HEU. Mm-hmm. But I think the big thing is if you started with a plutonium device that you've tested, you can gradually increase the amount of HEU and probably do a better job of modeling how interchangeable those things are.

Aaron 28:22

Right, and then we still presume that North Korea has a finite supply of separated plutonium.

Jeffrey 28:28

Right, but probably a lot of uranium.

Aaron 28:31

Right, because nobody quite knows how large their centrifuge plant is or what their yearly output is. Yeah, we're going to start a new project if we can get funding. We're pretty excited.

Jeffrey 28:42

We're going to try to model their uranium production to figure out what the throughput is, and we're going to guess how many centrifuges there must be operating.

Aaron 28:52

Oh, interesting. Do you know what type of centrifuge they use?

Jeffrey 28:56

We've got some ideas, but I think we could – our big question is if you look at how much uranium they are milling, can you guess how many other facilities they must have?

Aaron 29:07

Right. That's good. But I think now the listeners are saying, so what? So what? He went on the full Monty here. You guys have been talking about North Korea for the past 30 minutes for the fourth podcast in a row. I mean what does this tell us about the state of their program? You're all going to die.

They're going to die.

Jeffrey 29:26

So I think a couple of things. And I probably say this every flipping podcast, and so I'm sure people are tired of freaking hearing it. But whatever, like the behavior doesn't change, so I have to continue criticizing the behavior. Once again, right, so the North Koreans have paraded the missiles down – actually, I don't know what that avenue is in Pyongyang.

I know the one that goes through Tiananmen Square in Beijing, but I don't know. Whatever, through Kim Il-sung Square, the missiles. They've – Tested the nuclear weapons. They've now shown the nuclear weapons. They've shown a map with the targets to the United States they intend to hit. They have done all of these things that convey that their goal and that they are in the process of acquiring and that they now have acquired a capability to put a nuclear weapon on a missile and fire it at the United States, right?

And every time they do this, we have the same reaction, which is like, yeah, we don't believe you. And it's bizarre to me because we should be in the business of trying to get a test moratorium in place, not daring them to do something crazy. I always say it. We did the same thing to the Chinese. And to show us what a great idea our skepticism was, the Chinese put a live nuclear weapon on a missile and fired it across the country.

And that finally shot us up. And I just don't want the North Koreans to put a live nuclear weapon on a missile and launch the thing over Japan and drop it in the ocean.

Aaron 30:58

Yeah. Yeah. No. But, again, that just... You know, but, like, it's like...

Jeffrey 31:05

Otherwise, they're like... Look, what are we supposed to do? We rolled the missiles down the parade. We showed you the bomb. We tested the bomb. We showed you the map of the United States with the targets on it. You still didn't believe us. So, you know, here we go.

Aaron 31:20

Yeah, there's the physics package on a little footstool table type thing with the red apron, with the red – Yeah, well, God forbid they put a real one in a missile and do a live test.

Jeffrey 31:31

All right, so – So we should be seeking a moratorium on further nuclear testing so they don't develop a thermonuclear device and we need to be working on a flight test moratorium.

Aaron 31:44

Can I just say one thing before we sign off? Because this came up at a recent Republican debate. I got one more thing I want to say that's really important. But no, you say your thing. No, because it came up at a recent Republican debate and they asked Ted Cruz what to do about this. And he gave some thing about how Obama's weak, but then he said the things that we need to do is to augment missile defense in our allies, deploy THAAD in South Korea, give more missile defense to Japan, and talk tough to the North Koreans with more sanctions, which is essentially what the Obama administration is doing.

So there doesn't seem to be new thinking on what to do about this.

Jeffrey 32:18

So here is my sarcastic comment that gets me in so much trouble, is I often say to people – Like if you don't like the Iran deal, take heart. We're trying your way in North Korea and it's going great. That's true.

Aaron 32:33

This next week's podcast, we'll talk about Iran.

Jeffrey 32:35

Yeah, yeah. But I mean like – yeah, like our – we're trying the opposite approach, which is just all vinegar and like this is what you get. And by the way, I should say often – I find that like as the, the North Korea like debate is like way less friend or is way more friendly among people who disagree than the Iran debate.

And, and I think it's, I think, I don't know why, but I think it's because we all realize that no matter what we do at some level, we're basically screwed.

Aaron 33:08

Yeah.

Jeffrey 33:08

So like, like the, like the people who are not for engagement, like when I point out to them that like, if we do nothing, we're basically screwed. They're kind of like, well, yeah, that is true. And, and I have to admit that like, The chances they're going to give away these capabilities, pretty limited. So we're probably screwed.

But that's the second thing, which is incredibly unpopular at the moment and no one likes. And I feel like I am. This is the argument I had 10 years ago when I said we should let the Iranians keep the 164 centrifuges. And people were like, you know, this is crazy. You're giving everything away. They're not giving up the missiles they've built.

Like if we are going to imagine some kind of negotiation with them, The idea that they're going to give up what they've done to me seems crazy. The best we can do is to cap what they're at. I think rollback is, or what we used to call CVID, complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament. I think that's a fantasy because the North Koreans, they got the stuff.

What are we going to give them that's better than nuclear-armed ICBMs?

Aaron 34:14

Oh, I can actually see where your grant proposal is coming from, modeling throughput on uranium output.

Jeffrey 34:21

Yeah, because I kind of think that we should quit while we're behind.

Aaron 34:27

Right. Again, the freeze option, or lock everything in place and then begin to negotiate.

Jeffrey 34:35

Yeah, well, I'm happy with a freeze. It's not that I think a freeze is a wonderful solution. It's that a freeze stops the situation from getting worse, and then we can get on with the business of fantasizing about this government collapsing, which probably won't happen, but maybe. I don't think we have any better solution. I don't know.

I was in this meeting the other day. It was Chatham House rules, so I can tell you kind of what happened. Yeah. Yeah. We had this kind of discussion about how awful North Korea is for its neighbors to live next to because they do think like sink ships and shell islands and assassinate people, just generally the horribleness of North Korea.

We were talking about deterring provocations or managing the threat from North Korean provocations. And there's this discussion about whether there is stability on the peninsula. And I was struck by a really appalling thought, which is that things in the peninsula are actually kind of stable. It's just that that stability entails the North Koreans being able to regularly do really horrible things like put landmines in the DMZ and blow people's legs off.

And that just sucks, right? Because who wants to be the political leader who says – Hey, actually, this is the status quo, and while it kind of sucks, it's not as bad as any of the other options we have. And so, like, you should be glad that you live next to this, you know, awful state that kidnaps people and holds people ransom and kills people for provocations because, you know, because all of the other options to deal with this problem are worse.

Aaron 36:19

Like, that sucks. Is that a happy note to end the podcast? No! No! We're out of that business anyways. I think it's reality. I think what you're saying is that we need to come to grips with reality if we want to manage a problem because solving it doesn't look – well, solving it in terms of disarmament just doesn't seem feasible.

Jeffrey 36:41

Well, I got a happy note.

Aaron 36:43

Yeah.

Jeffrey 36:45

These pictures are freaking amazing. They are.

Aaron 36:47

We got the fat man in front of the compact man. I'm stealing that. Yeah.

Jeffrey 36:54

It'd be hilarious if we start seeing compact man used widely.

Aaron 36:58

Kim Jong-un is pretty compact.

Jeffrey 37:00

Well, no, the bomb is compact.

Aaron 37:02

The bomb is compact, but he's pretty compact too. He's smaller rotund.

Jeffrey 37:07

I guess you're right. I never really thought about you. Right. He's compact in.

Aaron 37:12

Yeah. This has gone off the rails.

Jeffrey 37:16

So I think we have to end it. Yeah, this is the part where we thank listeners for putting up with this crap.

Aaron 37:22

Yeah, we appreciate you listening. I have to apologize to listeners. We haven't been good about this podcast. We've got to solve this, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey 37:30

Yeah, well, we're going to have to do – we're going to have to set a time. Should we keep our time a secret or should listeners know when we record these things? We record them usually – we try to do them on Monday afternoons, right?

Aaron 37:40

Yeah, we do. We had a snafu last weekend. So I promise that more are coming.

Jeffrey 37:48

Yeah, so we'll do one next week. And then after that, I'm going to be in Paris and Vienna.

Aaron 37:51

So maybe we could do a transatlantic podcast. Oh, that's good. Get some accents under the podcast other than our terrible American ones. That's a great idea. Thanks, listeners, for listening. And thanks, Jeffrey, for coming on the show or being on the call.

Jeffrey 38:07

Yeehaw.