KCN-eh? July’s other North Korea Developments

Andrea Berger 0:01

That's just terrible policy. You're listening to the Arms Control Wong podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. My name is Andrea Berger, and I'm a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:20

I'm Jeffrey Lewis. I'm the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:29

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Riffey Career Center for the Middle East.

Jeffrey 0:34

And this episode is brought to you by me. I am still encouraging all of you to go out and, well, you don't actually have to go out. You can just click and order my novel, The 2020 Commission Report, an epistolary novel that recounts the series of terrible decisions that leads the United States and North Korea to stumble into a nuclear war.

Andrea 0:58

It's getting really good reviews. Yeah, it is. I'm excited to read it. I have got it on my list, and it is hopefully in the mail.

Jeffrey 1:07

It should ship for Tuesday.

Aaron 1:09

And as a fan of the Lewis family, I'm doing this so that you can buy yourself another cocktail this Friday when you need to take a load off and look at some nice California scenery.

Jeffrey 1:18

Ah, yeah, that would be, that would help. It would certainly help. I think we'll probably do a special thing on the Slack channel. Maybe if listeners go ahead and purchase it, maybe we'll do signed plates that you can affix to the inside of your physical copy.

Andrea 1:37

Well, guys, family pod today for KCNA wrap up for the month of July. And we're going to talk about a few things that happened in August, too, just because... We can. So Sohae is one that we've got to discuss a little bit because there's been, as we know, activity in the last month. We've also got some new developments around leadership visits to some pretty important facilities that we want to chat about and the return of some prisoner of war remains back to the US and then a big treasury action today.

So lots to get through in not very much time. Let's start off on Sohae. Jeffrey, I know you're sick, but we're going to make you talk about this. So tell us what you have been seeing at the Sohae facility, which is traditionally one of North Korea's big satellite launch locations, as well as a missile engine test facility with lots of heat.

Jeffrey 2:35

Yes. Lots of heat. Oh, Donald Trump. Yes. So I think there may be some misunderstanding about what that facility does, even for people who follow pretty closely. This is a facility used for space launches. And so there is a big pad with a gantry. And a checkout building and a mobile checkout building that's used to erect satellite launchers and then they launch and put satellites into space.

But at that site there is also a very large static test stand Where engines can be tested. And it seems, I mean, the North Koreans have said this, and the Trump administration has said this. And so notwithstanding the fact that they're all a bunch of liars, they all seem to agree that North Korea offered as part of a general set of steps on the ICBM program, To take down the engine test stand so that North Korea could no longer use this facility to develop new engines.

And, you know, they seem to be doing that plus There's a little bit of other kinds of changes going on at the site. So they're not taking the site down, at least not yet, and I think probably they won't, but they are taking down the engine test stand, and that's a sort of welcome goodwill gesture, although one that is, as we pointed out, does not mean they are not producing ICBMs, because in fact, That happens at a different place, and they still probably are.

Aaron 4:18

Why do you think they chose this site as the offer to the U.S. as maybe a competence-building measure or a token concession that they can put forward?

Jeffrey 4:27

I do. I mean, I think this is the perfect matched pair with taking down the nuclear explosive testing ground. You know... North Korea has already tested the engines for its ICBMs using this test stand. And so I don't think North Korea requires additional static engine testing. North Korea is now in the phase of flight testing those missiles.

So if they want to resume testing, they're going to take them back to the stand. They're going to do what they did in November, which is roll them out on a launcher and fire them. And so here is an object that Is kind of representative of North Korea's threat, so it makes for good you know, visuals when they take it down, but it doesn't actually restrain them. They can continue to produce ICBMs, which, you know, they seem to be doing at, at Sanam Dong, and they can flight test those ICBMs if, if negotiations collapse, and, you know, frankly, if they do feel the need to resume static engine testing.

It's not so hard to build an engine test stand, so it's easily reversible. They have other engine test stands in the country, including one that was sort of under construction but was frozen some years ago on the other coast. So it's kind of just like the nuclear test site, right? It's easily reversible, but makes for good television.

Andrea 5:59

I remember when we were all listening to the press conference that Trump gave after the Singapore summit, and he kept talking about how the North Koreans had already pledged in this bilateral, more private discussion to dismantle a missile engine facility that he described as being one the US had identified because there was so much heat. And when there was a whole bunch of analysts on Twitter and offline speculating around What facility he might be referring to, there were a number of people who thought it wouldn't be Sohae because you had the satellite launch facility at the same site and that wouldn't be one that they would be willing to make any sort of concession on because they insist that it's a legitimate, peaceful program and they have the right to the development of space.

So are you surprised to see changes not only to the missile test stand but also to the satellite launch facility

Jeffrey 6:57

Portion of that site. So Dave Schmerler and I are currently arguing about what we think is happening at the launch pad, you know, because the last image we have, the launch pad itself has not been taken down, but the building there is a, there is. A few years ago, North Korea made a series of or started a series of construction projects that were designed to make it harder to monitor their activity at Sohae.

So they covered the railhead so that you couldn't see things coming in and out. And then they covered the place where the rail took something from kind of the rail head out to the launch pad. And they built a large mobile building that would allow them to move the stages, again, covertly and sort of undercover. You would just see like the big building move.

That's the building that they're taking down, so it doesn't, at this point, prevent them from using that site. And so I, I don't want to put words in Dave's mouth, but one hypothesis. Is that this is about making launches more transparent, but still being able to continue them. And then I suppose the other hypothesis is that, you know, maybe this is the beginning of further work.

So if they take down the gantry, the launch gantry, I will be surprised.

Andrea 8:37

Are there other things you're going to watch for in terms of facility change?

Jeffrey 8:41

Well, I mean, I'm going to look at every building. I mean, you know, there are, yeah. I mean, if this is purely about just no longer caring that the U.S. can see them get ready for space launches, you know, maybe they take down the covering over the railhead. You know, they have that big control center that they built that was so fancy.

Sorry, I really am struggling today. Aaron, you got to jump in here, man. I'm going on too long.

Aaron 9:15

I was going to say the other potential thing is if you listen to it is that maybe they have a Hwasong-15 SLV they're going to paint white.

Andrea 9:23

Yeah, some speculation around mobile platforms to replace some of this functionality, yeah.

Aaron 9:29

I think the important thing that you're talking about is that, you know, it's not a throwaway. It's not a concession without some meaning, but it's sort of one of those concessions that doesn't get at the real heart of the issue. So maybe concession isn't the right word, about what it is that North Korea actually intends to do.

So they may be wanting to make their SLV launches more Overt or more public and can take down a test stand, but they have moved beyond the need or at least the desire to test and are moving on to a different phase, which is flight test, which for now appear to have been paused, maybe is the right word, while negotiations continue.

And I think the second aspect of this is something that you mentioned up top, Andrea, which is the POW remains, is the...

Andrea 10:19

Yeah, because these two things together have really been the morsels that the Trump White House is sort of feeding back to say the process that we have initiated is yielding fruit, as we told you it would, because we are making American foreign policy great again. And so the Sohey bit together with the return of 55 remains back to the United States have been really those key items that are being injected back into the U.S. political discussion.

Jeffrey 10:49

Yeah, you know, there was an interesting bait-and-switch with Sohae, which I forgot to mention. When the North Koreans released their statement, they said that they had pledged to stop production of ICBMs. And we actually looked, and that's the word that they used in Korean. And they offered the test stand at Sohae as a way to verify that.

Which, of course, it doesn't do, right? It doesn't actually verify non-production. You would have to go to the production facility and be inside. And so, you know, not to be overly, I mean, taking down the test site is a good confidence-building measure. It's a nice goodwill gesture. I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth.

But it also served to create the appearance of verification, right? Without actually having to offer verification, which in a case where you actually had a negotiated agreement, which this was not, that test stand would be wholly inadequate to count as verification for a ban on ICPM production.

Andrea 12:02

Right. They're picking things here that we can look at through national technical means without having to bring anyone into country and without creating disruption to the wider program, probably. It seems like that's kind of the framework in which this action and the Punggye-ri site explosions are all taking place in.

Aaron 12:24

Tell the listeners what the Punggye-ri site is in case this is their first one.

Andrea 12:28

The North Koreans allowed a whole bunch of journalists into their nuclear test site at Punggye-ri and blew up a bunch of the tunnels. Nice pictures, and you can see some of that from overhead imagery as well, but very much a sort of symbolic demonstration of the intention to put those facilities into disuse, if you can put it that way.

Jeffrey 12:57

Yeah, we just got a radar image of that site after the explosions.

Andrea 13:01

And?

Jeffrey 13:01

It's interesting. Well, we're still analyzing it, but it's interesting.

Andrea 13:08

Okay, well, next month you can tell us what you guys decided.

Jeffrey 13:15

Yeah, it's interesting.

Andrea 13:18

The other facilities that we've been looking at a little bit are some of the facilities that we suspect North Korea is using for heavy vehicle production for missile launch platforms. Jeffrey, do you want to tell the listeners a little bit about what the Seungri Motor Complex and the Kumseong Tractor Factory are believed to have significance in terms of for the military side of things?

Jeffrey 13:50

Well, I'm pretty sure the Coombsong Tractor Factory doesn't just make tractors. No. You know, yeah. Shocking. Dual use. I'm shocked. Anyways. Yes. So, you know. We see a lot of these kinds of visits. I mean, both of them make heavy vehicles, and we suspect that the heavy vehicles they make include heavy vehicles for transporting missiles. And that's something that the North Koreans have struggled with in the past, creating the vehicles that are capable of moving this stuff around.

And so we're always kind of interested in like, you know, where are they on the truck front? Andrea, you noticed these visits and had some suspicions about them. And it actually prompted me to remember last year because Kim Jong-un did a visit to Pyeongsang just north of Pyongyang and went to an automotive factory there. And at the time, we kind of went on like a crazy conspiracy theory rant because he'd been shown a bunch of civilian trucks.

And we just didn't buy it. We were like, no. You know, there's something weird about this visit. We're pretty sure it's not just for civilian trucks. There might have been like a secret military piece of this that we weren't seeing, which, you know, made us sound like, I think, loons. But then when North Korea launched the Hwasong-15 ICBM, we took one look at the inside of the building and we were like, that's the same factory.

Right. So we were able to identify the Hwasong-15 launch location from the inside of the building where it was checked out because Kim, a few months before, had been there. So, you know, it would not be unusual. Now this wasn't Kim, this was

Andrea 15:44

So in July, it was Pakpongju, the North Korean premier. But back in November, just before the Hwasong-15 launch, there had been visits, I believe, to Seungri and to Komsom as well earlier in the month. Now, within the span of three weeks, we've had Pakpongju go to these two facilities again to do inspections in relation to Targets that they have been set.

We don't know what those are, but they've clearly been set some and senior figures in the leadership are going to check in on them. Cho Rong-hae, who's a very senior official in North Korea as well, was visiting Back in May also, so there's been pretty consistent follow-up in terms of senior figures going to these two facilities and talking about their performance in manufacturing.

And always there's mention of how targets are for new types of motor vehicles. So we'll see what that is.

Aaron 16:50

I think the importance here is that you can't have mobile missiles without trucks to carry them on top of, without trucks to carry the missiles. And I think the backdrop to this is obviously the Singapore summit, the things we just talked about with Sohei. But also, I believe it was the New Year declaration by Kim Jong-un about his ultimate intent for the nuclear program and whether these are more breadcrumbs.

Would you say that's accurate?

Andrea 17:17

Yeah, and on top of that, so There's maybe a few other things that are relevant here. As you noted, you need launchers for the missile force, and North Korea's traditionally had a constraint in that it's been reliant on imports of those for the program. So converting particularly Chinese logging trucks, and it only had a handful of those.

So we've been watching to see what North Korea does in its own domestic Motor vehicle industry to try to get away from that sort of dependency. So this is kind of red in that light. And in addition to that, you got Kim Jong-un in the New Year's speech, as you mentioned in that same speech, he's talking about how the priority for 2018 is in respect to the nuclear missile program going to be the mass production of systems that it successfully developed and brought to fruition in 2017.

So here again, this is an important aspect of potentially that commitment and that mission for the domestic military industrial complex.

Jeffrey 18:31

If I can say just how weird this whole year has been, It is so strange for me how seriously people take the claims that other people are making about North Korea abandoning their nuclear and missile programs when the North Koreans have on record an official statement saying their goal is mass production. The North Koreans have outlined a number of facilities that are involved in that mass production.

We can see that those facilities are active and or expanding. And when asked directly whether they intend to abandon their nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, North Koreans either don't answer or, you know, say no. Why are we having this conversation over and over and over again? It seems really clear to me.

Aaron 19:20

It's like banging your head against the wall. We have this tendency to do this, which is, you know, foreign leaders, we, you know, sort of a lot of the analytical community, tell us what they're going to do. And then we try and infer meaning about what they really mean, rather than just say, oh, that's what they mean.

They tell us they want to expand their nuclear forces. They need more trucks. They want more independence to do so. And so, therefore, these visits become symbolic about Progress markers, at least that we can measure on the outside, towards their ultimate goal, which they've told us. I don't understand why there's a debate about this either.

Jeffrey 19:53

Yeah.

Andrea 19:54

Yeah, Ankit and Melissa and I last month on the podcast where we were in Seoul and, you know, we were lamenting about how I'd been asking out of curiosity a handful of sort of senior experts in South Korea about what they thought North Korea's intention was with respect to the nuclear and missile programs while dialogue was ongoing.

It was surprising that there were a number of people that thought that the North Koreans would voluntarily wind things down to show good faith while negotiations were ongoing. I thought that was interesting. I think there's many people who don't, but there was more than I thought that Said they did.

Aaron 20:34

But that's why, you know, cutting around the bull fecal material about what the test site sort of dog and pony show explosions and what Sohei really mean are actually important because you want to juxtapose those imagery. The words coming out of, I guess, the U.S. side versus actual actions on the ground and, you know, these little hints.

I mean, they aren't even hints. I mean, these overt hints. Continue to signal North Korean intent about where they want to go and ultimately, I think, should inform assumptions about what they're negotiating, what they're actually negotiating for, which is something Jeffrey always makes the case for, which is recognition of their nuclear program, perhaps with a pledge to eventually denuclearize.

But in the interim, they don't seem to have plans to do so. Quite the opposite, they have plans to expand or at least solidify the gains they've already made And then to formalize that into a more independent and efficient internal program across the spectrum.

Jeffrey 21:36

I have to tell a heavily sanitized version of this story, but did you see in the New York Times where I compared it to kind of the deal Israel has, which is to say we stop noticing that nuclear weapons exist as long as they talk about them less?

Aaron 21:50

Yeah. Yep.

Jeffrey 21:52

It was not the first time I tried to get that. Quote out. I actually gave that quote in another context. I was asked to rephrase it without Israel, which I think is the perfect metaphor for why that would be such a desirable policy for North Korea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's okay. Well.

Andrea 22:17

We also should talk about one of the other grand questions that is being floated in the public discourse about North Korea this month, which is, is the floor falling out from underneath the maximum pressure campaign? And in the context of that, we had a pretty interesting move from the US Treasury Department today, which sanctioned a Russian bank for its links to North Korea.

So that was one that kind of actually maybe was taken because or Timed now in part because there is this concern that China and Russia just have totally checked out of at least the game that they were willing to play along with for a while, which was that they supported a robust sanctions regime on North Korea for its nuclear and missile activities.

I think everyone realized that there were huge limitations to that even when they were paying lip service to the idea. But now, you know, in the last few months, you've really seen Chinese and Russian focus on how do we get sanctions rolled back and economic engagement with North Korea going.

Aaron 23:26

I mean, I'm going to flip the question around because I know this is an area that you're far more better informed on than I am. I mean, what do you make it?

Jeffrey 23:36

It's really absurd, Andrea, asking us questions about sanctions. I was about to say, I was like, I don't have the answers. What do you guys think? Like, oh, okay. You tell me. I think whatever you think. That's the answer to that question.

Aaron 23:48

Tell us. I mean, what did you make of this latest designation? I mean, I sent it to you as if you didn't see it. I think you had already had a tweetstorm about it. So, yeah, I was a little late to the party. And what do you think –

Jeffrey 24:00

I'm going to mansplain sanctions to Andrea right now because I'm far enough away that she can't kill me.

Aaron 24:05

I'm not mansplaining anything. I am asking a serious question here. I mean, what do you think about the pressure campaign? I mean, has it lessened? I don't have any insights or knowledge about this. So I am at your mercy.

Andrea 24:17

I think it really depends on which countries you're talking about their implementation of North Korea sanctions on. So You had, I think, more cooperation, if you can call it that, than previously with China in 2017. In some respects, people were actually pretty surprised about how much the Chinese gave at the UN Security Council and that they were willing to follow up with some action on a national level to facilitate implementation of the things that had agreed to in New York.

So there, I think we are seeing the floor fall out a little bit. You have had a real shift in focus by China towards how to get towards engagement How to facilitate these economic projects, that's partly been spurred on as well by the fact that South Korea is so willing, I think, to talk about those same things.

It really does want to figure out how do you work within the framework of the sanctions regime to still have more active cooperation with North Korea on a whole bunch of fronts. Now Russia, of course, is going to go along with that too because it has always put up a bit of a middle finger to the sanctions regime on North Korea and never really hidden its distaste for it.

So the fact that China and Russia have definitely walked back from at least the lip service they were paying To the idea of needing to have pressure on North Korea to compel it to come to the negotiating table is not surprising. Maybe a little bit more surprising on the South Korean side. I was a little bit more surprised there.

Again, In South Korea the other week, I got a lot of questions about where the loopholes in the sanctions regime were, and I've been asked that question in Seoul many times before, but mostly with a view to trying to understand how North Korea might evade sanctions, and now the conversation was actually about how South Korea gets around it to have more of a Sunshine-esque policy towards the North.

So with regards to a few countries, there's definitely been a change in focus and rhetoric and all of that. In other parts of the world, especially in parts of the world, I think that the U.S. had been quite heavily leaning on in the past year and which hadn't traditionally done much on North Korea, but had started to take it seriously because of U.S. pressure.

I think there is still probably a decent amount of focus on How to implement some of the sanctions at the UN level, because there's probably a feeling that the pressure from the United States is not going to go away quite yet. So there's a little bit of a nuance that needs to be drawn. But yeah, the Bank designation today was pretty interesting.

It suggests that the Trump administration wants to send a reminder that it is still willing to pursue sanctions on North Korea and those that assist it, even though negotiations are ongoing. But they did it in a way that is less confrontational than they could have. So as a reminder, Trump has said, I think, in public statements in the recent past that there are hundreds of sanctions waiting to go on North Korea.

And I think that's probably true. I would imagine Treasury has a whole bunch of designations lined up, and it was allowed to put out a very small handful today, including one on this Russian bank. And it chose a small Russian bank, like back in 2017, Treasury selected a very small Chinese bank as the first action against that country's financial sector.

And it messaged it a little bit differently than the China bank, so Bank of Dandong back in 2017 too. That said, the effect probably of sanctioning this particular Russian bank is not going to be enormous. It's more, I think, of a warning shot than anything, because this particular bank is like 206th largest in Russia. I get the sense it doesn't have much of a connection to the U.S. market.

It doesn't seem to have branches in the United States. Its foreign currency transactions, including for U.S. dollars, seem to be processed by Raiffeisen Bank in Austria. So I'm not clear on whether this is going to be a significant disruptive effect. It seems to be more about the signaling than anything in this case.

Aaron 29:06

Can I ask you guys a general question? Because you triggered this in my mind as you were giving that explanation is, what is it, and this may sound stupid and maybe Scott will cut it, but like, what is it that the two sides are negotiating now? Can I ask that general question? I mean, as we begin... Like the U.S. and North Korea, two sides.

Right, yes. Because, you know, these sanctions are supposed to reinforce maximum pressure to get something, in theory. And that something is... Well, that's easy, Aaron.

Jeffrey 29:40

The full final denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula as agreed by Chairman Kim. I understand that.

Aaron 29:48

I understand that that's what Pompeo says.

Andrea 29:50

Wait, fully? Can I just say that whoever made that cocktail, the Juche Bird cocktail, whichever one of our brilliant listeners made the Juche Bird cocktail needs to also make a CVID cocktail of some nature. I'm going to name check in here.

Jeffrey 30:06

Hold on. Paul Badreau. Badreau? Yeah.

Andrea 30:10

Paul, we have a job for you.

Aaron 30:12

That was the greatest tweet I've ever gotten. Yeah, it was good. But isn't that the point, though? I mean, because I know we're going to pivot to remains here, but this is the point of your book, Jeffrey, is to sort of mismatch expectations. And so sanctions can be used to signal, and they could be calibrated to send a small signal that the U.S. still wants to keep up maximum enforcement.

But if you still have that divergent about outcomes... Your strategy is all f***ed up, like ways, ends, and means to come out to a desired outcome. You're using specific means to get coerciveness to try and pressure North Korea to do something. Will this be more effective to try and change their policy?

Jeffrey 30:57

Well, right, and I mean, I don't want to give away too much of what happens in the book, but in the book when the diplomatic effort enters this kind of phase, which is told retrospectively because we had to take this chapter out, but... There is a point at which maximum pressure isn't working in part because the Chinese and the Russians are not particularly interested in economic pressure.

And so the administration... Looking for new tools to try to somehow make good on the president's insistence that Kim will give up nuclear weapons reaches over for coercive tools. And, you know, there's a discussion and there are some people who want to do a bloody nose, but they settle on a different policy, which they think. Will be less escalatory, but which of course is the kind of foundational mistake that causes the nuclear war of 2020.

So the thing I worry about is that because you are right, because there is no real goal, when they cannot I mean, first of all, they won't be able to reconstitute maximum pressure. But even if they could, maximum pressure wasn't really all that much pressure. I mean, it wasn't like Kim cared. They will find that, that, that, that those threats are hollow, and that maximum pressure is an illusion, and, and then they will have to decide what's next. And, you know, this sensible, smart thing would be to cut one's losses, to say like, oh wow, all this emphasis we put on pressure, that's probably pretty dumb.

But they're not going to do that, right? They're going to double down and they're going to pick something worse. And in the book, it's the thing that's worse that's the problem.

Aaron 32:53

Yeah, I mean, Andrea, I don't know what you think, but like...

Jeffrey 32:56

Available now in all fine bookstores.

Aaron 32:59

Sorry. You know, because the U.S. continues this maximalist position, which is fine, like... What I don't... I guess what I'm really asking is like... What is this leverage for if you're not going to trade it in for something? And like, what is that something? And that's just like, I think we had this talk the last time we had the family pod together.

Andrea 33:25

You always do this to me on the family pods. You're like, Andrea, why sanctions?

Aaron 33:29

Well, I mean, because sanctions in theory are supposed to give you leverage, but leverage only matters when you turn it in. Otherwise they start to become a liability. And then you have to escalate, as Jeffrey said. And if you're unwilling to pull the major trigger and you want to hit a small Russian bank, there are still steps up that escalatory ladder.

And so secondary sanctions can become more coercive, but it's like... Rationally, if you really think about it, it actually begins to undercut your leverage because then you have to coerce people who should be putting pressure on North Koreans, in this case, the Russians or the Chinese. And so there's a hindrance factor to sanctions where they start to become less affected, even if you're trying to put more pressure on outside countries to enforce them, if that makes sense.

Andrea 34:14

Yeah, I think there's a big strategic problem. And, you know, we've talked about this before, but that the whole concept of sanctions in the North Korean case, especially at the UN level, is cast with the objective of denuclearization of North Korea, which... I think many people no longer believe is realistic. I would be much more in favor of reworking that framework to think about how we can promote North Korean involvement in arms control and transparency and threat reduction measures without unrolling sanctions that are essential for things like ensuring nonproliferation.

Aaron 35:00

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Andrea 35:02

So I think that's kind of the direction I would take things. I also think that this view that some of the political commentators out there have been putting out in the last few weeks that you shouldn't unroll any sanction until denuclearization has occurred and been fully verified. And even Frederico Mogherini, the EU's foreign policy chief, came out with that statement.

And I was like, What are you saying? Well, they can have the implementation. That's just terrible policy. So that idea, I think, also needs to be done away with because it's really silly and it denies you the ability to use some sanctions as leverage rather than just making it an all or nothing black or white situation.

Jeffrey 35:48

Aaron, have we run past your heart?

Andrea 35:49

Yeah, we may have to leave POW remains for next month and find out if they're cow bones as the North Koreans gave the Japanese.

Aaron 35:59

And I took the conversation this place I mean it's just we've been doing a lot of North Korea on the podcast it's like sometimes we focus on the hyper details because of this really cool imagery work that Jeffrey does and like you know Basically that thread that Andrea had out today about the visit to the engine facility or the truck facility.

But if you step back, and POW remains is sort of part of this, isn't it? I mean, if you wanted to do it really quickly, it's like how they handle POW remains is indicative, I would believe, of how they feel pressure, right? So, like, if they're really feeling pressure, they don't f*** around with the U.S. and something as small as $55,000.

The return of 55 remains. Now, you don't feel that much pressure if you can make the U.S. Secretary of State and the representatives from the State Department go back and forth a few times, if that makes sense. It's indicative that the pressure isn't as strong as we would like to believe. If they feel comfortable enough to flaunt something as what should be extremely low-hanging fruit, which is a confidence-building measure about returning what are bones at this point.

Andrea 37:12

Yeah, the North Koreans with the POW remains I mean, they clearly played around with the process of negotiating their repatriation, and there was issues about not showing up or rescheduling meetings or that sort of thing. But now that those have been sent back, I at least, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on this, I would be quite surprised if we did get cow bones, as has happened in the past.

I think that would just be such an unnecessary provocation, and they know... How, how Trump is thin skinned and doesn't like, you know, being embarrassed. So I, if I were North Korea, I would stay away from that, because you can actually probably get a lot more political benefit out of having done something that does look like a confidence building measure.

But even if there are anomalies or things like that, when The U.S. now goes through the process of trying to identify those remains. I would suspect that actually you won't hear about it from the U.S. if there are anomalies because they also want this to be seen as a confidence building measure that has huge political significance in the way that the president has described it.

And in the past, you know, I think there's been evidence when previous remains have been repatriated that some of the concerns that investigators had were also kind of downplayed internally within the U.S. system so as not to disrupt this bilateral dialogue with North Korea.

Aaron 38:39

I think NBC or The Washington Post would be the first to tell us of that case, and they'll be calling Jeffrey Lewis for comment.

Andrea 38:44

Probably.

Jeffrey 38:47

Well, I will say, you know, I mean, this is not an easy, you know, for the remains that are recovered and then returned, you know, it's not like they're... Buried in, you know, nice plots where they're identified. So, you know, I sometimes wonder, you know, about the kind of mixture of bones and things. I suspect that has to do in the abductee case, but probably especially in cases involving servicemen who, you know, are sort of, you know, killed in the middle of nowhere, you know, who are found later, that they're probably just Difficulties and mistakes happen, you know, and I expect that they'll only be able to identify a fraction of the remains.

And we probably shouldn't, shouldn't immediately assume that that just because this process is difficult and uncertain, that it necessarily is the North Koreans jerking us around. I think it's just hard to do.

Andrea 39:48

Well, guys, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast this month. I love doing family pods with you guys, so thanks a lot.

Jeffrey 39:59

Well, we love doing family pods with you because you're better at it than we are. It's fantastic. I don't have to drive. It's great. Plug your book one more time.

Andrea 40:08

Yeah, buy Jeffrey's book, people.

Jeffrey 40:11

Yes. I'm telling you, I promise it's not terrible. Like I know that that's like a trope that like nonfiction writers like try to write fiction and then there are like terribly awkward sex scenes that, you know, make your eyes bleed. But that didn't happen this time. You know, we've gotten, I literally don't, I've gotten all good reviews.

Like I promise, I promise it's good.

Andrea 40:33

And go and check us out on the Slack channel if you're not already a member. That's right.

Jeffrey 40:38

If you like what we do, you can support the podcast and our research by heading over to patreon.com slash acwpodcast. Again, that's patreon.com slash acwpodcast. The link is in the show notes. And kick us $5 a month or $3 a month if you're a student. And you'll get access to our wonderful Slack channel as well as a variety of interesting goods at higher support levels.

Thank you for listening.