If there’s one thing in the public discussion of proliferation that troubles me the most, it might be this: the systematic minimization of North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities in the American news media. Someone could write a book on this phenomenon and its causes, but life is short. Let’s just focus on just one question for now: how far can North Korean ICBMs fly?
News reports persistently describe North Korea’s three-stage space launcher, the Taepodong-2 (TD-2), as capable of delivering a reasonably sized warhead to Alaska or maybe to the western continental United States. But at least if we go by the official, unclassified, publicly released estimate of the U.S. government, that’s wrong! The TD-2 can range all of the USA, from sea to shining sea.
Here it is in black-and-white from the National Intelligence Council’s September 1999 paper, “Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States Through 2015”:
“A two-stage Taepo Dong-2 could deliver a several-hundred kilogram payload to Alaska and Hawaii, and a lighter payload to the western half of the United States. A three-stage Taepo Dong-2 could deliver a several-hundred kilogram payload anywhere in the United States.”
Emphasis added, so nobody misses the point.
This many-handed estimate reflects the bygone debates of the 1990s. Initially, it seems, the TD-2 and little brother, the Taepodong-1 (TD-1), were thought to have two stages each. When the TD-1 took flight in August 1998, lo and behold, it had three stages. That forced a reconsideration of what the TD-2 might look like, with the results you see above.
When the TD-2 ultimately materialized—flying in July 2006, April 2009, April 2012, December 2012, and February 2016, the last two times successfully—it had three stages. (We’ve never seen pictures of the 2006 version; at least one news report said it had only two stages.) For whatever reasons, though, reporters have mostly gravitated to estimates associated with a two-stage version of what turns out to be a bigger rocket. And the more often these estimates are repeated, the more the confusion is reinforced.
It probably doesn’t help that the U.S. government no longer spells out these sorts of estimates. Anonymous officials ascribed this choice back in May to both the bad aftertaste of the Iraq WMD debacle and what reporters called “an effort to avoid strengthening and encouraging Mr. Kim.” The U.S. Air Force’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center does periodically release a document on missile threats, but it coyly offers a range of “5,500+” km for the TD-2, alluding to the lower bound of what defines an ICBM.
Lest this silence engender any doubts—has that 1999 estimate changed, perhaps?—after this February’s launch, the semi-official South Korean news agency described the TD-2 as having a range of 12,000 km if used as a missile. Give or take a kilometer or two, that’s the distance from North Korea’s east-coast launch site to downtown Miami. Hey, Puerto Rico is safe, at least!
And what about North Korea’s mobile ICBM, the KN-08, which it has displayed a number of times since 2012, but it has yet to fly, or its apparent successor, the KN-14?
We don’t know much about the KN-14, but in testimony this April before the Strategic Forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, Admiral William Gortney, the commander of US Northern Command, was faced with this exact question about the KN-08. Asked whether he assumed that the KN-08 could target any point in the continental United States, he responded in the affirmative. South Korean media reports agree, ascribing a 12,000 km range to the KN-08—the same as the TD-2.
The North Koreans certainly haven’t been shy about their ambition to hang a nuclear Sword of Damocles over spots 11,000 km or so away. Lately, they’ve also tried to put to rest any doubts that the KN-08 is a real missile.
Before anyone objects: all the usual caveats apply. ADM Gortney, in his testimony, assigned a low probability to the idea that the KN-08 could perform successfully, a reasonable comment about a missile that has yet to be flight-tested. But now that the North Koreans have enjoyed their first successes in flight-testing an intermediate-range ballistic missile and a two-stage, solid-fueled submarine-launched ballistic missile, a KN-08 flight-testing campaign seems like a logical next step. Stay tuned.
Obviously, too, what the government says isn’t the last word. Experts are free to devise their own estimates. And none of this discussion is intended as a comment on the wisdom or efficacy of missile-defense programs, which is a topic for another day. (Here’s what I wrote a few years ago.) But just for clarity’s sake, it would be helpful for our reporters to pause before recycling what so many have already written so often. Instead, they might be well advised to start fresh. And a fresh assessment could start by considering what official sources in Washington have had to say.