Transcript
Transcribed automatically: it certainly contains errors. It’s pretty good, just not perfect. We provide it here because, for accessibility, it’s better than nothing.
Jeffrey Lewis
0:02
And so we went through every video we could find of both of those facilities, geolocating every scene so that we could cross buildings off our list. It was exhausting. 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 the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
Aaron Stein
0:35
And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Riffey Career Center for the Middle East. This episode is brought to you by me and my book.
Jeffrey
0:46
Aaron, I wrote a novel and I want everyone to buy it.
Aaron
0:50
Yeah, I mean, we had to sort of keep it secret for a while, but big congratulations to you that it's out.
Jeffrey
0:55
Yeah, that's right. It hits store shelves, actual physical store shelves, August 7th. And it is called the 2020 Commission Report. It is an epistolary novel, which is to say a novel that purports to be a historical document that is written as a government commission-style report for how we ended up in the nuclear war of 2020 with North Korea.
Aaron
1:24
It's fiction, I should say. But yeah, I'm really looking forward to reading it.
Jeffrey
1:27
I'm hoping it stays in the fiction section.
Aaron
1:30
That's right. And I will be buying copies so that I can help pay for your next cocktail on Twitter.
Jeffrey
1:37
Yeah, so you can find it at all fine retailers. We've actually got some prime real estate in Barnes and Nobles. If anybody still goes to real bookstores starting August 7th. But you can pre-order now. We'll include a link in the show notes. And I should say the number one complaint I've gotten so far Is that it doesn't read like a real government commission report.
And my only response to that is no kidding.
Scott LaFoy
2:00
You're welcome.
Jeffrey
2:01
Yeah, you're welcome. You're welcome. That's right.
Aaron
2:05
So we were going to talk about the NATO summit today. We're recording it just after that sort of fiasco took place. But I think you have something hot that you want to tell us.
Jeffrey
2:14
Well, by the time this drops, I think people will already see Ankit Panda is going to report that we found it. We found the original covert enrichment facility in North Korea at Kangson.
Aaron
2:33
Yeah, I mean, you hinted to us just as we went live to tape. So really, listeners, this is live to tape. This is our first reactions. That's awesome, man. I mean, you have to take us through the story about how this came about and how you started looking for it and obviously your wizardry with the geolocation.
Jeffrey
2:50
Yeah, well, I mean... So we've always thought that there might have been... It's not really a second. It's a first enrichment facility. We've always thought that the one we know about at Yongbyon that was shown to Sig Hecker in 2010, that that was the second, and that there must have been one built before that. But we didn't really know...
Where to look. And so starting this year, there were a series of leaks. The first one was in the Jungang Ilbo in Korea, which said that U.S. officials actually had located the secret plant. And then there was David Albright at ISIS got a version of the name, although he called it Kangson, K-A-N-G-S-O-N-G, which is not actually a place name in Korea.
I mean, it's kind of an old transliteration. But once we had a place name, we started looking. And because we have language students on board, we pretty quickly decided it was K-A-N-G-S-O-N. And actually, Ankit Panda reported that, that that was the correct spelling. So it turns out it's useful to have language expertise on staff.
Aaron
4:04
Thanks, Middlebury.
Jeffrey
4:05
Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Middlebury graduates, or soon-to-be Middlebury graduates. And so we, in particular, Grace Liu, who we've hired, by the way, who is one of our graduates who's now... She and Dave and I did this one together. We started looking at those places, and the funny thing is... The place called Kangson in North Korea, you might know as Chollima.
It's where the steelworks are right outside of Pyongyang. Oh, really? Yeah. And so, actually, this was kind of a... This was one of those terrible sinking feelings where there are a couple other Kangsons in the country, none of which had any facilities at them that really looked suspect. But we were kind of looking at it like, oh crap, because there are a ton of large industrial buildings there.
Aaron
5:00
Yeah, I was going to ask you, what were you looking for specifically? Because you've shown me the picture, so what made you zero in on that one?
Jeffrey
5:08
Well, so Dave and I did it in the Kind of, I think it was the only way, so it was both the smartest way but really felt like the dumbest way possible, which is the big industrial facilities there are the steelworks and the tile factory. And so we went through every video we could find of both of those facilities, geolocating every scene so that we could cross buildings off our list.
No, it was exhausting. So we started with the tile factory, and there's one good video of a visit to the tile factory, which, by the way, because we got kind of punchy, we were laughing, because Kim Jong-un nearly hits someone in the video. He's looking at some tile on the wall, and he is unhappy with the tile.
And he turns around and is yelling at these guys, and they literally jump back. And as they jump back, if you look, you see he makes a fist with his hand.
Aaron
6:08
Oh, really? That's interesting.
Jeffrey
6:09
And then he's, like, cracking jokes, like, ten minutes later. To relieve the tension, I'm not going to shoot you with an anti-aircraft gun. Yeah, you know, I think you can see that they're all really sweat-stained. It's a summer visit. It was super hot.
Aaron
6:24
And I think he was just, he was cranky, but we lose it. He's wearing the pajama pants, right?
Jeffrey
6:29
This is, you know, that white, the flowing white shirt. Oh yeah. Yeah.
Jeffrey
6:33
All right. So we cross off all the big buildings at the tile factory, right? Cause they are all, I mean, I mean, it's possible things are Potemkin, but like they all have a plausible use on the tile factory. So then we start going through the steel works, which is much bigger and we don't, We don't manage to cross off every building, but, like, by the end, like, Dave and I are joking that, like, we're going to, like, defect to North Korea and, like, go be steel workers.
Aaron
7:00
That's right. You're going to bring the local Pittsburgh Union to North Korea for some kimchi.
Jeffrey
7:04
Yeah, well, because, you know, like, not only were we geolocating or identifying the purpose of all the big buildings, but in the course of it, we found where the swimming pool was and the ping pong room and the exercise center, like, you know, because they show off all the amenities.
Aaron
7:20
Right, right, right. Of course.
Aaron
7:21
It's amazing. Okay.
Jeffrey
7:22
And so, you know, you kind of get to the end of this process. And, you know, we've bounded ourselves by the geographic limits of this area, which is, I should give a shout out to, there's a book called North Korea's Cities, Industrial Facilities, Internal Structures, and Typification by this Austrian academic, which is incredible because it sort of tracks how the boundaries of all these units have changed over time.
Somebody's dedicated their life to studying this. That's amazing. it was funded by the South Korean government, which, you know, we use it all the time in geolocation. It's interesting. Yeah, and that's what it's for. so we're, we're like, kind of looking around, and, and actually I was looking around and saw this building. And describe it? Can you describe it to the listeners? I mean, is it worth it?
Aaron
8:17
Because I'm looking at it now, like right here in front of me on my computer screen.
Jeffrey
8:22
Well, so what I did was we'd seen the published reports that it was bigger than Yongbyon.
Jeffrey
8:29
And so I sat down and I measured the floor space at Yongbyon. And I kind of made notes about, like, you know, depending if it was long or if it was squarish, how big it should be to be bigger.
Scott
8:43
And this building, I was originally kind of like, well...
Jeffrey
8:47
I was skeptical because it wasn't that much bigger than Yongbyon. You know, we've heard that it's like twice as big. It's like twice as big as the original single hall at Yongbyon. It's not twice as big as the two halls. It's like maybe 20% bigger than that.
Jeffrey
9:03
Which, you know, visually just isn't much bigger at all. But then I really started looking at this facility, and it's flippin' weird. And so I'll talk you through the things we saw that really disturbed the heck out of us.
Aaron
9:20
Okay. Let me tell it to me, because I'm staring at it right now.
Jeffrey
9:22
All right. So notice that the entrance to the facility is all the way at one end and requires traveling kind of a curved road.
Aaron
9:34
Yes, it does. It's sort of like a curve that takes you to a 90 degree that parallels the side of the building.
Jeffrey
9:40
So you can see the security perimeter?
Jeffrey
9:43
So this is a very secure facility that really is designed so that people cannot go in and out, right?
Aaron
9:50
Yeah, there's one way in and out.
Jeffrey
9:52
And to go in, that's not a typical North Korean factory entrance. You know, the typical North Korean factory entrance is kind of a long roadway lined with trees and with banners hanging across it. And, you know, like the security checkpoint is going to be in a little bit.
Aaron
10:08
Yeah, the security checkpoint's close to the front of that curve.
Jeffrey
10:13
Oh, yeah. And so, like, this is like a really secure facility, which is weird. As you follow it in, you see that there's a plinth? No, not a plinth. A plinth is the base, right? It's an obelisk. There's like a little monument?
Scott
10:29
Yes, yes. I think the term for North Koreans is immortality spire.
Jeffrey
10:34
Yes, so as Scott says, an immortality spire. We're going to have to put this in the show notes so people can follow along. Okay, but this is an interesting observation. Usually that means... A Kim, and in recent years, Kim Jong-un has been there.
Aaron
10:49
So they put that at everything they go to.
Jeffrey
10:52
You know, they put up these little monuments. Dave hates it when I call them monuments because some of them are just murals. But this facility has two monuments or monumental objects that suggest somebody important has been there. But I've never seen this facility before.
Aaron
11:13
Right, because you guys watch every single video.
Jeffrey
11:16
It's secure, but it's also not ever reported on. So now that's very interesting. All right. So obviously there is the big building, which is suitable as a centrifuge hall, right? Yes. Okay. Ton of traffic in and out. We see vehicles there all the time. That's also weird because if this were a factory that was constantly in production, you would expect him to take a visit.
Aaron
11:48
And then use propaganda to put it out.
Jeffrey
11:51
So it's super busy and we still haven't seen it. And then what nailed it for me is if you keep going in, do you see the big tall buildings? The residential high-rises?
Aaron
12:05
Yes, they are off to the They are on the opposite end of that concrete pad.
Jeffrey
12:11
By North Korean standards, that is gorgeous housing. It is. And I have only seen housing like that at facilities we associate with either the nuclear program or the missile program.
Aaron
12:25
Yeah, there seems to be one, two, three, four, five buildings.
Jeffrey
12:28
And then I ask, where do those people go to the grocery store? How do you walk out and go to the grocery store? You can't, right?
Jeffrey
12:36
That is a self-contained community that is totally sealed off from the neighboring area. Those high-rises don't look like any other housing anywhere in Chollima.
Aaron
12:53
Okay. That's amazing. You can see me now, listeners. I'm like six inches away from my computer just staring at these pictures. But yes, go on.
Jeffrey
13:02
And once you see it, you can't unsee it, right? No, you can't unsee it. This building does not belong in this place.
Aaron
13:08
I'm staring at it right now. No, that's exactly right. That's weird.
Jeffrey
13:12
Zoom out and look at all the other buildings around. That thing does not belong in that place. Yeah. Look at that. And then once we saw it, we're like, okay, that is too weird. Like, that's just... If that's not a centrifuge plant, it is something as interesting as a centrifuge plant. Right?
Jeffrey
13:32
Absolutely. And then you kind of look at the layout. So then we do another thing. We give a little love to our friends at Planet. Planet takes pictures almost every day, right?
Aaron
13:40
Yeah. Are these the four pictures that just showed up that you put us on hold for?
Jeffrey
13:43
No, no, no. Because I don't tell you about those two. That's an interesting backstory. All right. Well, so... It snows in North Korea, right? It does. In two years of winter planted images, I cannot find a single image of snow on that building's roof. It is hot year-round. It's not super hot because it's not a gaseous diffusion plant, right?
So it's not actually hotter than, say, the community of people with, like, wood-burning stoves across the street who are living in huts. You know, their heat island is hotter. But it is... Always warm, and, and we had Octave, our intern, who is a rising senior at Middlebury. And I, I just want him to like, skip his college degree and just come work for us all the time. He's a GIS major, and it's like, no, no, can we just give him the degree? And like, we've literally taking him out of the intern space and just giving him an office because he is so productive.
It's like, get out of the kid's way. He downloaded all the Landsat thermal images. Every single image we have downloaded has been hot. Again, not as hot as the neighboring area. It's not like it's boiling hot. It's certainly not as hot as the Steelworks, which is super hot. But it's always warm.
Scott
15:08
Now, that's a weird North Korean building, right?
Jeffrey
15:12
Warm year-round, well-stamped by people living in beautiful houses who aren't allowed to talk to their neighbors.
Aaron
15:20
It's really isolated.
Jeffrey
15:21
Goddamn. Okay. Once you see it, right, you can't... And here's where I say we can't prove that that's an enrichment plant, but we don't have to because our question isn't, is it an enrichment plant? It's, is this the site that the U.S. identified? We know that the U.S. thinks that there's an enrichment plant in Kangson, so we only have to reverse engineer the U.S. analysis.
And, like, yeah, this would be it. I know any U.S. intelligence analyst who saw this site would be like, that place is weird. And I think there had been reports that initially it started with a defector who defected, who worked nearby. Like, it makes perfect sense, right? There are a lot of workers who work nearby who can actually see the thing across the road, but they know that they can't get in, and apparently the rumor got out about what it was.
Man. And, by the way, we know we're right because, you know, the only reason that we're releasing this now is Ankit Panda got... Is it Panda or Panda? I guess I should ask Ankit, right? Panda. I want to say Panda because he's, you know, He's more dapper than life.
Aaron
16:33
He's a dapper dude, man.
Jeffrey
16:34
He's a dapper dude. He's not really a bear at all. Ankit is reporting he got a U.S. government source. I don't know, actually. I don't know the identity of the source, so I'm probably mischaracterizing it, but that person confirmed that, yeah, it's it.
Aaron
16:51
It's the one that the U.S. government, just to be clear, suspects of being the enrichment facility. That's right.
Jeffrey
16:55
And they actually aren't certain... Apparently, or at least I think what David Albright said is that some of the governments that have been shown the site are not convinced it is a centrifuge enrichment plant, and we can't settle that based on the external imagery we have. But this is the site they're worried about, and I can absolutely see why they're worried about it.
Aaron
17:17
Yeah, I think it's important because we just jumped right into it for the listeners. The Yongbyon site was considered to be the second because of how well it was built. Yeah, how quickly. Because Sig comes back and he says, this thing was fantastic, it was perfect, right?
Jeffrey
17:29
Well, and I actually calculated how quickly they installed the centrifuges, and they installed the centrifuges at Yongbyon at a speed that was basically comparable to the fastest the Iranians had ever installed centrifuges. And so I think the way I always say it is it wasn't their first rodeo.
Aaron
17:44
That's right.
Jeffrey
17:44
They had clearly installed centrifuges before because they did it fast. So we knew that there was an earlier site. And this is it. Now there's some interesting stuff which Ankit has surfaced, which really is going to shape our analysis. Because, you know, according to Ankit, the U.S. didn't decide it was an enrichment plant until 2010. Okay. That facility was constructed in 2002, and it was externally complete by 2003.
Aaron
18:21
Huh, that's actually quite interesting.
Jeffrey
18:26
So it probably operated for six or seven years before... The U.S. knew what it was.
Other voice
18:36
Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Sweet.
Jeffrey
18:44
Now, in defense of the United States intelligence community... They're the ones who picked up on the shipment of tubes in the 2002 period and concluded that there must be a brick and mortar facility under construction because the shipment was too large for a pilot or for research. And you know what? I was skeptical and I didn't believe them.
Aaron
19:07
It was a different era. I mean, we had reason to be skeptical, I should say. That's what I'm trying to say.
Jeffrey
19:13
I mean, yeah, well, I don't know. You know what? I mean, I can defend myself. I like to be wrong for the right reasons. And just having a bunch of tubes, you don't actually know that there must be a site under construction. And admittedly, they never found it. They didn't find it until 2010, right? I mean, they probably found the construction earlier than that, but they didn't conclude this was the plant until 2010.
So... You know, I was admittedly skeptical of, you know, since we'd already invaded one country on the basis of centrifuge plants that didn't exist. That's right. I was not willing to give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt. But they were right. The large shipments were almost certainly intended for this large plant. If, you know, it turns out it's an enrichment plant, which I, you know, obviously I lean toward that explanation because it's flippin' weird.
You know, it's hard to believe what else it would be.
Aaron
20:16
Yeah, and you know, the timeline actually, oh man, it just shows how complicated this is. I mean, just to zoom out, like, they've been at this for a very long time.
Aaron
20:28
They've got a lot of HEU. If that timeline is correct, and I don't doubt Ankit's reporting... Oh, no, no.
Jeffrey
20:39
Oh, wait. Ankit's reporting about when they found it, but we're the ones who have the... We went and bought satellite... No, no, no.
Aaron
20:48
Sorry, I'm talking about the timeline. Not the identification of the thing. The timeline. They have a lot of HEU. Especially... And then they were just showing off Yongbyon, weren't they?
Jeffrey
21:00
So, I think the purpose of Yongbyon was to trade. We were going to do freeze for freeze, and they were going to freeze Yongbyon, which they built for the purpose of being frozen.
Aaron
21:17
And that's why they showed it to Sig. Similar to the reactor.
Scott
21:23
And... That would at least jive with my memory of some government folks' interpretation of the entire North Korean nuclear program at that point, which was like, that's when the mid-2000s era is when the bargaining chip concept started to become in vogue. And it's something that's kind of dropped off recently. But the whole idea of building up a program to trade parts of it away.
Jeffrey
21:47
Yeah, I think they built... I actually, an unnamed colleague who I would love to give credit to, I'm just not sure that he wants credit for it. We'll thank him in a later blog post or a later pod, I guess, podcast if he wants credit. But he points out that if you look carefully at the Obama administration official statements, particularly once this site was located, This was a kind of test for them.
You know, they kept saying, oh, you have to freeze enrichment beyond Yongbyon. I think they had mentally, and by the way, I disagree with this decision. I think this is not the right way to handle this. But I think their idea was if they got a freeze and they saw activity at Kangson stop, Then they would know the North Koreans were serious because they were freezing things we didn't know about or thought we didn't know about.
So they envisioned holding this as a kind of test. Now, I think that's a terrible idea because, you know, it's the wrong mental model of how states make decisions. It's not like people become nice and trustworthy people. If a state can get away with cheating on an agreement, it may very well do it. And that doesn't invalidate...
I'm not looking for honesty and I don't need Kim Jong-un to go on a personal transformation where he... This is not f***ing excellent. We're not naked. We're not in a hot tub. I don't need him to go through personal growth.
Aaron
23:29
You just made a Northern California reference that people won't get. But that's different, just to get this one back on track, that's a different tact that they took to Fordow, isn't it?
Jeffrey
23:42
That's right. Well, because in Fordow, they said that the Iranians figured out that we knew. They knew that we knew, and so they were going to declare it before we could burn them. So we burned them before they could declare it.
Aaron
23:53
That's right. It was a race to see who could get it out first.
Jeffrey
23:56
Now, the problem with that thinking here is, you know, the name of this place leaked in concert with us discovering yet another site. So it's now that other secret site that I guess people are holding back as the litmus test, and I suspect the reason you have seen the name of this place leak now... Is because, you know, for somebody like Bolton, and I'm not saying it is Bolton, I'm just, Bolton was involved in the 2003 decision.
You know, the existence of a facility like this is the way to prove that the North Koreans are liars. And so my guess is people have been leaving breadcrumbs hoping that we'll find him.
Aaron
24:44
Which we did. Well, I don't know if you saw your Twitter feed today, but Donald Trump released the letter that Kim Jong-un sent. Did you see that?
Jeffrey
24:53
I did. We are, at the moment, having Grace look for discrepancies between the English and the Korean.
Aaron
25:02
I think my point is not to bring... This is a very large program, and this idea that they can be systematically just wiped away in less than a year or something along those lines, I think... Just doesn't jive with everything that we know. And now that, you know, if this is the place that just helps elucidate just, and that timeline all goes together, that this is a really big undertaking and it's extremely, extremely serious.
I mean, I think that's obvious to all of our listeners, but somehow I just think it needs repeating.
Jeffrey
25:35
Well, right, because, you know, the site was externally complete by 2003. I will have to go back and double check to make sure this is right, but I believe it was warm by 2003. And so you have to assume that it started producing HEU in that time frame. Maybe there was a warm-up period. Yeah, exactly. But, like, 2003 is 15 years ago.
Yeah, man. That site has operated at at least... Twice the capacity of the original Yongbyon for 15 years.
Aaron
26:16
Jeez. Sorry, because we really are doing this raw. Like, right before we got on the air, you said you got satellite photos in the mail. Oh, yeah.
Jeffrey
26:24
We bought all the historical imagery. Because if you go to Google Earth, there's nothing between 2001 and 2009, which is really weird because it's a super heavily covered place. And maybe it's because they've dumped all the older image in favor of many, many newer images. But in 2001, there is nothing there. And by 2009, there is a centrifuge facility.
And obviously, the fact that Ankit is saying that we've noticed that it was nuclear in 2010 leads to the question, well, how long was it there before that? So we went and bought images from 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2008 to nail down timeline. And it was being built in 2002 and was externally complete by 2003.
Aaron
27:05
I have this sinking feeling in my chest, man. Oh, God. This is big.
Scott
27:14
You want another sinking feeling, Aaron?
Scott
27:18
Look what it's four kilometers from.
Jeffrey
27:20
Yes, that's right. Just tell the listeners. The Chomjin Missile Plant. I know. Oh, my God. I suspect that one reason they may have wondered about its purpose is because it was so close to the Chomjin Missile Plant. But You know, it's also just close to the highway and it doesn't have rail access. So it looks like the UF-6 canisters will presumably, you know, presuming it is in fact an enrichment facility, must go in and out on trucks and then onto the highway and, you know, off to be converted.
Or first converted into hex, then back so it can be converted into metal and made into shiny bombs that will kill you and me. Yeah.
Aaron
28:09
Is this a good time to plug your book again?
Jeffrey
28:14
You know, it's a funny story about the book. When the summit was announced, there was a decision to postpone publication of the book. Yeah, we knew this as insiders. The publicity team believed that Kim Jong-un was about to give up his nuclear weapons. Ha ha ha! I kept saying, like, did you read chapter two? Chapter two, by the way, is no longer in the book because it's happened.
But chapter two was about how the summit process collapsed. And, you know, if you've been reading my nonfiction writing, you would know it's collapsed in, like, approximately the way I expected. Although it's not exactly dead. I mean, Trump is still vacillating between... Pretending it's not happening and that things are fine. And he's blamed the Chinese, but he hasn't blamed Kim directly.
So it actually...
Aaron
29:15
He tried flattery today.
Jeffrey
29:17
Yeah, it hasn't fully collapsed, but... But like, we're clearly now, I have a much better, I mean, I always had a good, I like them. I have a good relationship with the publicity people, but like my editor and the publicity people are like, oh, this is going exactly how you said it was going to go. Like, yep.
But chapter two is now in the, now a nonfiction article and it's been removed from the book. So why don't we get it out before the nuclear war part happens?
Jeffrey
29:47
People are going to need something to read in the fallout shelter.
Aaron
29:49
The big picture here. But zoom out. I mean, if this is what you think it is, I mean, what's the big picture takeaway?
Jeffrey
29:58
Well, look, I mean, I think there are a couple of big picture takeaways. One is that North Korea has a pretty big uranium infrastructure that we knew about. Like we knew it existed because we saw how quickly they built Yongbyon, but also because we saw when they do remember a couple of years ago, I published an article about how they were renovating the uranium concentration plant, the mill.
Aaron
30:19
Yes, I do. Yes, I do.
Jeffrey
30:20
What is it? Pyongsan. So we knew that they were pushing uranium through the pipeline in amounts that seemed excessive for just Yongbyon. So, you know, now we have a facility and then we have a certain size. And, you know, it's actually not as big as I expected. But it's been operating longer than I expected. And my guess is that this is not the only one, right?
We've already seen NBC has said that there's a third site someplace.
Aaron
30:49
Right, so it's one of three, I think is important. Maybe it's the first of three.
Scott
30:52
Well, it's the first of, I would say, at least three.
Aaron
30:56
Yeah, good way to say it.
Jeffrey
30:58
You know, I mean, this building went up pretty fast. I mean, hopefully we'll be lucky and all of them will look the same.
Aaron
31:09
Yeah, because it has a pretty distinct design.
Jeffrey
31:12
Yeah, we'll have, you know, clones of this model where you've got beautiful high-rises, you know, in an enclosed area. So that's one realization is this is a big uranium enrichment infrastructure. North Korea is not going to give up their nuclear weapons. Like, the thinking is that, and I think the reason partly this, that people feel okay leaking this, Is just like when we knew about Yongbyon and we were holding back this as our kind of litmus test, I think the other sites are now the test, and it's okay for this one to be out in the open.
I mean, it's not okay, but it was inevitable. I think we have a better understanding into why people felt like the North Koreans Not serious about bargaining away their nuclear program. In fact, quite the opposite. They're willing to build facilities for the purpose of trading them, or they're willing to trade old facilities, but only if there are new ones on offer.
But you know, there's a bigger thing, which has nothing to do with North Korea. Which is this facility was complete by 2003, September 2003. It may have been a little earlier than that, but the picture we have is from September. And it wasn't identified as a uranium enrichment plant until 2010, which would mean for the first time we, the U.S., missed a A fissile material production facility before it went into operation.
Historically, the U.S. always found fissile material production facilities before they went into operation. Now, it is more complicated than that. The Soviets put their centrifuge plants at their gaseous diffusion sites, and so the U.S. didn't understand they were centrifuge plants. But did think they were gaseous diffusion plants producing HEU. As I've written, I think the Chinese enrichment plant was a near call.
They identified it pretty quickly, but they didn't realize it was operating when it was. So, you know, that was close. I think people have pointed out that we were slow to realize that Demona had a reprocessing plant, but we knew it was Demona, right? This is like a really clear miss, and it's a miss that we warned about because centrifuge plants are hard to find.
Like, the intelligence community had the tubes.
Aaron
33:54
That's what I said, they had the tubes.
Jeffrey
33:55
And so they knew that there was a plant, but they couldn't find it. Like, they knew it existed, and they looked for it, and it took them seven years to find it. Because centrifuge plants are easy to disguise. Because even now, being told what it is and looking at it and saying, yeah, it looks weird, like, that's still the best I can do.
You know, if it were a gaseous diffusion plant, it would have to be huge, so big that it'd be like it has no other purpose, and it would be hot, hot, hot.
Other voice
34:25
Mm-hmm.
Jeffrey
34:26
You know, and so a gaseous diffusion plant or a reactor, much easier to ID. This is just a big, warm warehouse.
Aaron
34:34
Yeah, we talked about this so much when I was a grad student about how these things were easy to hide.
Jeffrey
34:39
Actually, I wrote an article that everybody hated. Now it's like 10 years ago, where when AQCon happened, I was like, this is a really big moment. Because in the past, we used to be super confident we would always catch fissile material facilities. Proliferation was not a thing you could do in secret. Like our whole model of safeguards was secret facilities are hard.
We almost certainly will find them. And so what we really have to do is guard against diversion. And that technological reality shifted under our feet. And we got really lucky in Iran. Right? Because we caught them every single time in Iran. But what the North Koreans demonstrate is you can't always count on finding centrifuge facilities, which means maybe there are more out there we don't know about.
Not just in North Korea, but in other places.
Aaron
35:39
I mean, that's not a happy note to end this podcast, Jeffrey. You're supposed to leave the listeners with some sort of upbeat joke about like, don't worry about the end of the world type thing.
Jeffrey
35:48
It's going to be good for work here at the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies.
Aaron
35:55
That's right. It'll ease my cocktail drinking tonight. I'll have an old-fashioned take the edge off after this.
Jeffrey
36:02
I mean, it's a serious point that we're in an era where... Monitoring the spread of nuclear technology, of technologies to make nuclear explosives is going to be really, really hard. And we're going to have to think about different tools. And a lot of those tools are going to be like asking nicely and incentivizing people. And, you know, that's right.
Like a lot of the old coercive tools are, are just, they ain't what they used to be. And, you know, okay, maybe that's bad, but like, we're going to have to like, it's the world we live in and we're going to have to deal with it.
Aaron
36:38
I think that's a happy note. I think that's the best we can do on that. But besides this, it's just fantastic work. I mean, you were excited, and now I know why. This is better than the NATO communique.
Scott
36:53
For so very many reasons.
Jeffrey
36:55
Yeah, we could save that one for another pod. But I should give a huge thanks to Dave and Grace. I mean, they were, and Octave, they have been so incredible throughout this. I mean, poor Dave. If we have to watch another North Korean steel worker play ping pong, I think his eyes are going to bleed. And oh, you know what?
We're going to put it all up on Geo for Non-Pro. Which is our cool crowdsourcing site. And so I am sure we have not exploited all of these images. I'm sure there's stuff left to see.
Scott
37:29
And if you want to come to geo4nonpro.com,
Jeffrey
37:36
Whatever hang on good job it'll be in the show notes in addition to when we say it correctly if you come to geo4 non-pro with the number four the number four geo number four non-pro.org we're gonna upload all of the images dating back to 2002 which you know google earth does not have And again, huge thanks to our friends from Planet, because seeing that there was never any snow on the roof, that was a huge, huge red flag that helped us give confidence to go to Anka, because we couldn't go back repeatedly.
So we had like one bite at it, like, okay, here's our guess, see if you can go confirm this site.
Aaron
38:24
And he did. Yeah, big shout out to Ankit. He just continues to do great work. The guy's an OG, man.
Jeffrey
38:31
Why does he not work for the New York Times or the Washington Post? The dude's an OG. I love the diplomat, and I love that he's at the diplomat, but why? Why he is not the most famous WMD reporter on the face of the planet, I don't know. He's the best, man. He really is good.
Aaron
38:46
I mean, friend of the pod, everything. I mean, that's fantastic. I'm looking forward to reading his write-up of this, and it should be in the show notes as well.
Jeffrey
38:54
Yeah. Scott, you want to tell us how things are going on the Slack page?
Scott
39:01
I'm going to go ahead and ballpark that it's going to be quite excited as of time of listening to this. I just imagine a number of people just exiting out of the podcast and jumping onto Slack. So it's good. And if you would like to contribute to both the continuation of our research, the blog, and the podcast, you can head over to patreon.com slash acwpodcast where you can kick us $5 a month or $3 a month if you are a student with a .edu or equivalent email address.
And we'll send you an invite to our Slack channel.
Aaron
39:38
Yeah, and just we're going to roll something out kind of new. We're going to drop some mini pods in there for the Patreon members. So we won't broadcast them. They won't be on the Arms Control Wonk website or the specific podcast page, but there'll be less than 10 minutes of either me, Scott or Jeffrey or somebody else talking about something of relevance in the WMD sphere that happened that week and a special subscriber benefit to all of our Patreons.
Scott
40:04
Yeah, we're going to be doing a pilot program of that in the Slack channel, and then we're going to roll it out for real on the Patreon as soon as a certain one of us figures out how to do that. It'll be a pilot project.
Aaron
40:19
It's like a pilot enrichment program. We'll figure it out eventually, and we'll take it industrial.
Scott
40:22
It's the Kongsan of podcast experiments. Hey, Aaron and Scott, thank you for letting me boast.
Aaron
40:32
Thanks for finding this, man. This is awesome. I'm happy to be a part of it.
Scott
40:37
It's really showing the Chollima spirit. And thank you for listening.
