Dudes from the SHIG II: Electric Boogaloo

Aaron Stein 0:02

Dudes from the SHIG. Dudes from the SHIG. Dudes from the SHIG. Dudes from the SHIG. You are listening to the Arms Control Wong podcast, the leading podcast on arms control disarmaments and nonproliferation. I'm Aaron Stein, a contributor to the Arms Control Wong blog and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East.

Scott LaFoy 0:22

And I'm Jeffrey Lewis.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:23

I'm the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wong blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Hey, Aaron, we are joined by our new producer, Scott LaFoy. Welcome, Scott. Hey, guys. Scott, since you have saved the podcast and, by extension, our lives, why don't you introduce yourself so people get to know you?

Scott 0:47

Yeah, absolutely. I'm Scott LaFoy, as you said. I'm currently a master's candidate.

Jeffrey 0:52

Wait, wait, wait, Scott. I wasn't clear on that. What's your name?

Scott 0:55

Scott LaFoy. I think we need to say it a couple more times just so everyone has it. Okay. I'm a master's candidate over at Georgetown university security studies program. I focus, I'm also an independent contractor. I do a lot of open source satellite and on the ground imagery analysis specifically for this.

Jeffrey 1:16

Do you hear a tin cup rattling?

Aaron 1:18

I do. I do.

Jeffrey 1:19

All right. All right.

Scott 1:21

Higher Scott. And I have the worst quality cause I am phoning in from Skype on my Android phone, which is not a great combination. From Glorious Roslyn, which apparently just has a bad combination because I seem to proliferate malicious sounds into a recording stream. So I focus in basically missile stuff, mainly around North Korea.

Jeffrey 1:46

And you and Dave Schmerler are going to be starting up an open source podcast, right?

Scott 1:52

That's right. We're talking about it this week. Very excited about it. Going to be hopefully talking about the Scud ER or the Scudder.

Jeffrey 1:59

Or as it says in U.S. documents, it's interesting. The U.S. documents all say ER scud. And I notice documents all say scud ER. And I never know what to do. Actually, I do know what to do. I just follow the U.S. practice. But yeah, I feel like scudder.

Scott 2:15

Scudder makes it even worse to Google, though, because Scud is a cloud formation. That's what the English word is that they pulled the missile from. And Scudder, I think, is an additional either atmospheric condition or cloud formation or something that pilots have to watch out for. So it doesn't actually clarify searches for it. It just makes it differently bad.

Aaron 2:39

You got to save the good stuff for your podcast, man. I was about to say. This is stuff to add to the growing network. And we are not going to talk about the scud today. No, we have – it's continuing in our latest theme, Jeffrey, of the podcasts where the country that I think you spend the most time on was up to more imagery, more imagery and more tests.

Jeffrey 3:02

Yeah, North Korea. But you know, we're not just gonna call this. it's not just about the North Korean test. No, no. We have a lot to talk about. We're gonna name this. Dudes from the Shig. Too Electric Boogaloo. I like that. I like that. You know, harkening back to one of our old podcasts, we talked about Dudes from the Shig hanging out. North Korea. Yeah, man. Interesting. Interesting stuff. Aaron, you want to, you want to start us off before I like start to totally hijack the podcast and Talk about 80-ton boosters and dudes from the Shig and all the other crazy stuff I normally talk about.

Aaron 3:40

But I want to know when – so for the listeners, there was a rocket engine test. And I want to know, Jeffrey, was it on a school night?

Jeffrey 3:48

Yeah, it was. But fortunately, no one seems to care this time around. Only the Wall Street Journal really got super interested in it. So, like, there wasn't a ton of – It wasn't a ton of coverage. I guess, you know, poor Kim Jong-un. Like, what do I got to do? How do I get people's attention?

Aaron 4:08

Well, luckily, there's the Arms Control Podcast that focuses almost primarily on Kim Jong-un's actions. So tell the listeners what happened. So the North Koreans did a static engine test.

Jeffrey 4:18

So it's not really a full rocket. It's just the engine with the fuel and the oxidizer pumped into it. And they tested the long-awaited so-called 80-ton booster, which is to say it is a brand-new engine type that we have heard exists in North Korea but we have never seen.

Aaron 4:39

Yeah, and they made it. I almost feel like they're playing us now because they made it easy for a lot of open source analysis for all sorts of different things. Schematics laid out on a table, the color of the plume, all these things. So tell the listeners.

Jeffrey 4:55

Yeah, yeah. So the – I guess it was in late 2013. Bill Gertz got a leak that said that the Iranians and the North Koreans were developing a new 80-ton booster. And I will admit I was totally confused by this for the longest time because I thought it meant that the rocket stage weighed 80 tons. But actually what it meant was that the thrust of the new engine was 80 tons, which is really big.

That's like twice as big as a Musudan. It would be by far the biggest missile engine that we'd ever seen in North Korea. And then in January, the Treasury Department sanctioned a bunch of dudes from the SHIG.

Aaron 5:41

That's right. The impetus for our last podcast.

Jeffrey 5:44

Yeah, yeah, the Shahid Hamad Industrial Group, which makes Iran's liquid-fueled missiles. And Treasury sanctions press releases are now like a great source of intelligence. They put all kinds of detail in them, which I – yeah, go ahead.

Aaron 6:01

No, it's amazing because it's like multiple paragraphs. Like I have it open in front of me. We're talking a lot of information packed into this – into what is supposed to be a boring press release.

Jeffrey 6:11

Right, and so it says, within the past several years, Iranian missile technicians from Shig traveled to North Korea to work on an 80-ton rocket booster being developed by the North Korean government. So that was an actual confirmation that the thing was under development. And so then, you know, the North Koreans get around to doing a static engine test, and, you know, Kim Jong-un is there looking... Portly.

Yeah, looking fat and happy. And they even call it an 80-ton engine. Well, it says it has 80 tons of thrust, just so we know that it's exactly what the Treasury Department was talking about.

Aaron 6:53

I mean, they really...

Jeffrey 6:55

They really want to know. Nice big pictures of the engine. You can see it. High res.

Aaron 7:02

I mean, very high res pictures.

Jeffrey 7:04

You know, could be better, but pretty damn high res.

Aaron 7:06

Yeah.

Jeffrey 7:08

Well, you know me. I always want it better. And then there are a couple of shots. There's a diagram on the table in front of him. Was that Nathan Hunt who actually bothered to do it, Scott? It was. Yeah, we got a little love to old Nathan Hunt who took the schematic and then flipped it right side up and put it next to the engine.

And you could see that he was looking at a diagram of what got tested. So it's... It's a very interesting piece of hardware.

Aaron 7:41

Right. So let's just jump right into it. I mean, you can learn or at least make some assumptions about the piece of hardware from the not as high resolution photographs as we would like, but nevertheless, high resolution photographs that were put out of the static engine test.

Jeffrey 7:55

Yeah, so I guess the first thing that we're doing is we're looking at the color of the plume, which looks to be pretty clean. It's pretty translucent, so it doesn't look like it's kerosene. It's a kind of pinky, purpley color right up at the top. So we're wondering what the fuel is, maybe. Maybe it's UDMH, but I can't really tell.

Aaron 8:27

But why would we care? I mean, for those who aren't sort of versed in how far missiles fly and what the plume matters and the propellant, I should say.

Jeffrey 8:36

Oh, man, you're listening to the Arms Control Walk podcast? Right. Okay. And you don't – yeah, better fuel. Better fuel means it flies further. And this thing is 80 tons of thrust. How do you get that? One way you get that is with more energetic fuel. Right. So it's physically large, but it's also – it's physically large, but it's more advanced, right?

And so one way it's advanced is it probably makes use of better fuel. Right. And the other thing, and it was I think George Herbert who saw this. Friend of the pod. Yeah, friend of the pod, that it has what's called a gas generator cycle where you take some of the propellant and you burn it so that you get this hot gas which then powers the pumps, right?

Right. So it's sort of – It just makes that – it's a more sophisticated engine. So as a result, the physical engine itself is a little bit lighter.

Aaron 9:42

Right, and then you can double-check all these things by looking at the flip-right-side-up diagram that we – also a friend of the pod, Nathan Hunt, pointed out. I believe I saw it on Twitter, but it may have been going around the private email chain.

Jeffrey 9:56

Or on our super secret Slack group.

Scott 9:59

Are you not on our super secret Slack group?

Aaron 10:01

I am actually not on the super secret Slack group.

Jeffrey 10:04

I got to invite you. We've got several of them of various communities and human beings. That way we can all post stuff. Scott, you're on our super secret Slack group or at least one of them.

Scott 10:14

I am. Well, now I'm real interested in that little piece of info sec right there. But yes, I am in at least one of them. Online people knowing that we have Slack groups. I mean, we can't, can't give it all away for free on Twitter sometimes. We make mistakes. Yeah, it's better to make the mistakes privately. That's the whole point of open sources, so people never know when you're lying.

But almost everything that goes on in the Slack channel makes it out to Twitter anyway. It's usually just, yeah, shooting down ideas early and collaborative processes. But also Twitter has 140 characters. It's real hard to discuss the efficiency of different fuels. I'm like, hey, that mock diamond may indicate that we got something different going on in 140 characters when you're talking to seven accounts.

Jeffrey 11:00

Hey, you know what you should do, Super Producer Scott? You should put some drops in this stuff. You know, like little sound effects, like when I'm joking about you, you know, rattling.

Scott 11:10

Oh, yeah. I need to just get that like a slide whistle sound and just turn into like a, it'll be a regular Benny Hill podcast. I'll switch the, I'll switch the theme music in for one of them and not tell y'all.

Jeffrey 11:23

I've hijacked your, I've hijacked your podcast.

Aaron 11:26

No, it's fine, man. It's our podcast. And now we're adding the podcast, you know, from family with Scott. So this is good.

Jeffrey 11:32

So it's a more sophisticated engine. It's bigger than anything we've ever seen in North Korea. It's got some fancy design aspects to it. And I think most importantly is it doesn't look like anything in Russia. It is not a copy of a Russian engine. It is not a... North Korean assembled version of a Russian kit. They designed a rocket engine.

Aaron 12:00

See, you took my lead right away from me, but that's exactly where we were trying to go, is that this is a big deal, not just because of the 80 tons of thrust, the sort of Indications that this is a more energetic propellant, but also that this is not a rocket engine that you could, quote-unquote, buy off the shelf from the Soviet Union or the Russians.

Jeffrey 12:22

Yeah, the North Koreans said it's to put a satellite in geostationary orbit, which is something they have said repeatedly. And they've often, you know, shown off these models of what they call the Unha 9, which just, you know, is always just a giant version of an Unha. So I'm not sure that the models are actually all that revealing, but they've always indicated they want bigger rockets.

Obviously, we're interested or rather concerned, not because they're going to put something in... Put a satellite in geostationary orbit, but because it does seem to be, you know, further evidence that they're coming up with fancier ways to make ICBMs. It's going to be a heck of a missile.

Scott 13:05

And that geostationary bit gives them a little bit of cheating room on how they can test long-range missiles over Japan, depending on how people react to that. Because you don't reach geostationary by just launching over ocean from North Korea. You've got to go eastward and at the equator. And almost every line to that goes over Japan. Unless they've got some real clever fuel diverts ready for late stages.

Jeffrey 13:33

Yeah, no, I think they're...

Aaron 13:35

I want to talk about the space program at some point.

Jeffrey 13:40

Because I think this is a really interesting... We've got a real dilemma, right? Because I don't think... I think it's going to be really hard for us to sustain pressure on their space program.

Aaron 13:58

But, Aaron... Yeah. Well, I actually, I'm really interested to see where that conversation is going. So I was, I was listening.

Jeffrey 14:07

I'm going to try to end this on a happy note.

Aaron 14:10

I know that was actually, we're getting to the policy recommendations without getting sort of the meat of this, which is why do we care then about dudes from the shit?

Jeffrey 14:19

Yeah. Yeah. So I think, so I have a, I, I unpopular opinion alert. The traditional view has always been that the North Koreans develop things and they supply them to the Iranians, right? For state cash. Right. Just missiles for cash.

Aaron 14:42

Right.

Jeffrey 14:44

And the assumption has always been that basically what the North Koreans have done is acquire Russian and really Soviet technology, do a little bit of reverse engineering, and Really not that much. And then they're basically selling off-brand versions of Soviet technology to other countries, which is a really comforting model because it implies it's like, well, if you could turn off the Russian spigot, then maybe the North Korean program would go away and so all of their customers would wither.

Or if you solve the North Korean problem, then the customers would wither.

Scott 15:22

And even if it doesn't

Jeffrey 15:24

This stuff is all old and Soviet, and so it's kind of limited in what you can do with it. And so I think we had this really comforting story that we were telling ourselves. But what if the North Koreans actually know how to design rocket engines?

Aaron 15:45

Right. So they've traded in the Volga for an upmarket domestic brand. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Jeffrey 15:52

And then the worst thought, which is why the dudes from the Shig come in, what if that flow of technology to Iran— Has resulted not in Iran being a dependent customer, but that the Iranians have themselves acquired these capabilities. And what if they're better at this than the North Koreans? And what if it's actually now technology from the Shig flowing back into North Korea?

Aaron 16:21

Right. So then the original purchaser... Acquired the expertise to then turn around and sell upmarket models back to the original – to the proliferator, to the original vendor or source.

Jeffrey 16:33

Right. So the way that this always got told was like – so the Soviets gave the Egyptians scud bees and the scud bees were under Soviet control but somehow the Egyptians got I think two of them out of the count and sent them to North Korea and the North Koreans reverse engineered them and it's – That technology base, right, that led to the Scud C and ultimately the Scud D slash extended range Scud.

Scooter? Scudder? This is where we have the drop of me like shooting daggers at you.

Scott 17:16

You called it a Scud D, which is like my specific wheelhouse of anger. Like, oh, man, we don't need more things called the Scud D. That makes sense, the third or fourth one.

Jeffrey 17:24

I know, I know, I know. It's not my fault. Yeah, I wish. Well, and, you know, the Libyan Scud C is probably a Scud D. Not what gets called a Scud C in other places, but that is a whole other podcast that Scott and Dave can do. But ultimately culminating in the Nodong, right? Right. And the Nodong is just a giant, supersized Scud, right?

You've scaled that engine up as much as you possibly can and made the thing as big as possible. Well, the North Koreans sold the Nodong to the Iranians, and the Iranians... Well, they sold it to the Iranians and the Pakistanis, and the Pakistanis just copy it. The Gari is just a nodong. It's a straight copy of a nodong.

But if you look at the intelligence estimates, both the stuff that Bob Walpole used to say in open testimony when we had missile defense debates, but also some of the stuff that got leaked through WikiLeaks, like the joint threat assessment we did with the Russians – The Iranians really took the Nodong and made it their own as a Shahab-3.

So it's got an aluminum airframe and not a steel airframe, and there are all kinds of changes to it. And so one thing we did for the Nuclear Threat Initiative is we tried to look at How much the North Korean space launchers like the Unha and just the whole Unha series, right, the Taepodong-1 and the Taepodong-2, which as space launchers are called the Unha, those which use Nodong engines, how much those are like the Iranian space launchers, which also use Nodong engines, or at least Shahab-3 engines.

And I... I think that the Iranians are better at this than the North Koreans and that some of the technological developments we're seeing first in Iran are migrating back to North Korea. And so what was so interesting about that Treasury announcement was the claim that it was the guys from the Shig, the dudes from the Shig, who were, and I think the word was, critical to the development of the booster in North Korea.

Yeah. Right. Right. Because it means that the Iranians and the North Koreans basically have like a co-development scheme going. And so, you know, horse is out of barn.

Aaron 19:51

Right. And so the direct quote is the dudes from the Shig have been critical to the development of the 80 ton rocket booster, comma, and both traveled to Pyongyang, dot, dot, dot.

Jeffrey 20:00

Right. Except it used their names and didn't call them the dudes from the Shig. Right.

Aaron 20:03

But, you know, in the interest of not butchering other foreign languages on the podcast, we're just going to call them dudes from the Shig. Right.

Jeffrey 20:11

Yeah, but that's really bad, right? Right.

Scott 20:14

You know, we've had hints of this.

Jeffrey 20:15

I am always amazed that this blog post didn't get more attention. But a couple of years ago, Jeff Forden, maybe it was 2009, so it's more than a couple of years ago.

Aaron 20:26

Friend of the pod.

Jeffrey 20:27

Yeah. Back when he was a blogger scum like me, wrote this post that starts, I've been given access to a series of what appear to be internal secret Iranian documents by sources I trust. And so there are Iranian memos that detail cooperation between Iran and North Korea and I think Chinese entities that show that the Iranians and the North Koreans are really doing co-development.

That it's not just that the The Iranians are buying stuff from the North Koreans. This is truly co-development. And as a result, you know, liquid fuel missile technology is something that I think we have very little chance of controlling.

Aaron 21:13

Are you sure it's not work on the fusion food truck?

Jeffrey 21:17

Wouldn't that be amazing?

Aaron 21:19

It would be good. You know, rolling down the streets of Pyongyang with Persian food. But, you know, it's ultimately sort of the case of when… Well, let's spend a minute on this, Aaron.

Jeffrey 21:29

Because, you know, I loved when I was living in D.C., you know, Taqueria, right? Like the Korean taco truck?

Aaron 21:35

I do. I know it.

Jeffrey 21:37

Yeah, that was fantastic. What is our… Persian, Korean... You know, it's like a bulgogi meets... Pomegranate and walnut stew?

Aaron 21:55

I don't know. I'm trying to imagine. I don't know. It's hard to integrate pork into any Iranian dish.

Jeffrey 22:05

Well, okay. Fair point. ... Yeah, they both make it. Oh, man.

Scott 22:16

Exciting. I used this pun already with Schmerler, but I would vote the name would be S'morg as bored.

Aaron 22:23

Oh, my God. Show's going off the rails.

Jeffrey 22:29

Wait, have you guys been to Moby Dick in D.C.? It's my favorite, like, semi-fast food Persian restaurant ever. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I have. Fantastic. All right. So anyway, that, wholly apart from the question of fusion food, we're looking at fusion rocket engines, I think, and it's like a bad thing.

Aaron 22:50

No, it is a bad thing. Right. And then these engines, I just think it's worth repeating just because we got a little off track, is that they are twice as powerful as their predecessors, which suggests that the The development has been pushed forward a lot by two states that we worry a lot about in this country, which is Iran and North Korea.

And then flipping again over to the policy implications about what you do about this, because there's enough for us to talk about it even if nobody pays attention. But what do you do about it now?

Jeffrey 23:25

Yeah, so this is wildly unpopular. I've tried this out on a number of people. Everyone absolutely hates this idea, but I think it's true.

Scott 23:34

I think we have to cut our losses on trying to control liquid-fueled missile programs.

Jeffrey 23:39

I think the deal with the North Koreans on the missile program has got to be... You get to keep launching unhas. I guess they don't call them unhas anymore, but then I would be required to pronounce a longer, more complicated Korean word that we can just call KMS. So I think you've got to cut your losses. I think you've got to recognize that if we're going to negotiate with the North Koreans on their missile program, and God forbid if we should ever get around to negotiating with the Iranians on their missile program, which I'm not very optimistic about, There is no chance of rolling back the liquid-fueled missiles, right?

And the only thing we can hope to do, I think, is to stop them from testing stuff on the solid-fuel side. And even that, I think, is a long shot.

Aaron 24:31

But, you know, missiles sort of made an appearance into the JCPOA, you know, all of that entire saga, and that was just the ultimate red line for the Iranians. I mean, even more so than accepting what are pretty stringent limits on... On the enrichment program. They were willing to make concessions there, but the missiles were always just a place where we were never going to go.

They were never going to go, excuse me.

Jeffrey 24:59

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, my guess is that, you know, what we could reasonably hope for from the Iranians is not any kind of limit on their missile program because, I mean, first of all, I don't think they're interested. But also, second, we would have to do it on a regional basis, right? We would have to capture the DF… The DF3s and Lord knows whatever else the Saudis have as well as that surprisingly robust scud force in the UAE that nobody likes to talk about.

Aaron 25:37

Some of us on the podcast probably shouldn't talk about it.

Jeffrey 25:42

Yeah.

Scott 25:44

You can remain silent, but yeah, I don't know that we really want to do that.

Jeffrey 25:52

So I think what we might be able to do with the Iranians, though, is try to find a way to get them to cut off the North Koreans. Because even if the North Koreans are much more advanced than people have thought, and even if they did develop this system, I'm going to take the Treasury Department at its word that the dudes from the SHIG were critical.

So if the dudes from the SHIG were critical, then one way to pressure the North Koreans is to cut off the dudes from the SHIG.

Aaron 26:23

Yeah, from traveling to Pyongyang, not from Pyongyang. So the flow of information going away. But I think it's another thing. It's not where non-proliferative efforts have failed. I mean, I think that they were successful in significantly delaying programs, but If they are self-sufficient in designing new engines, you can't wish that away. Because going back to your original point, they aren't buying stuff off the shelf from the Soviet Union, setting up a production line in their own country, and then just knocking out knockoffs.

But they're making design improvements. And if they can do this reliably, we have a longer-term problem.

Jeffrey 27:03

But that takes my happy note of like maybe we can work with the Iranians to cut off the North Koreans and puts it firmly on the unhappy note that just like we have to accept the North Korean missile program, Aaron, I think we have to accept that we're always going to end these podcasts on downers.

Aaron 27:20

Or the fundamental choice, I think, Iran, we made that choice. It's do you try and limit fissile material or missiles? And we went for fissile material. North Korea is ahead of them on the fissile material and obviously weapons design and testing phase. So do you want to keep kicking that can down the road? So this is the happy note.

You can begin to make policy opposites.

Jeffrey 27:44

Wow, that is the most depressing happy note I've ever heard, Aaron.

Aaron 27:49

It's just reality, man. I like to think about what exactly should we do.

Jeffrey 27:54

Yeah.

Scott 27:55

No, you're right. You're right. You're right.

Jeffrey 27:58

You know, the other happy note, of course, is we have a reason to do another podcast the second we have recorded this week.

Aaron 28:06

That's right. It's two in a week, and we got to bring back one of our oldies but goodies, dudes from The Shake.

Jeffrey 28:11

Yeah. And we were able to do that because, take one more bow, Scott.

Aaron 28:15

Thank you for saving our podcast. Yeah, thank you, Scott. Schmerler's coming on. I mean, I think our listeners probably want to know who he is. Jeffrey and I talk about him all the time and his geolocation skills.

Jeffrey 28:29

You think we should blow Dave's cover right now?

Aaron 28:32

Yeah, we can do it.

Jeffrey 28:34

Yeah, okay. So Dave is a former student of ours who was such a good student that we hired him to be a research associate. And he is our point man for all nuclear threat initiative projects. And so he oversees the building of the missile models, the geolocation of things, everything. He is, he is really great. He basically has the job that Melissa Hanham grew out of as Melissa grew into her more

Scott 29:09

More important role here. Dave has come along and taken it over. And you know, I have to say, right, it hurts me. But I think Dave is better at geolocating stuff than I am. Certainly better than I am. I'll tell you that much. Oh man, I challenged Dave with a joke. where I posted a picture of my cat from my family home. I saw this. Yeah, Dave messaged me within like five 30 seconds with my home address and what high school I went to and a couple other like pretty amusing family details.

It was pretty interesting to, he's a fast one. So now anytime I post like funny pictures online, if there's anything personal, I put a big old black bar over him because now I need shmurl screens just like the North Koreans.

Aaron 29:54

I think on that note, that's a plug for the forthcoming Sir Schmerler and LaFoy podcast on the Growing Arms Control podcast network. We are now reinstituting and the band is now back together and getting bigger. So I'm happy. That's a happy note.

Jeffrey 30:10

Yeah, we've got to find a way to get Catherine and Melissa on too.

Aaron 30:14

There's room on our growing empire. So thanks, Jeffrey. Thanks, Scott. Thanks to the listeners for listening.