North Korea’s New Short-Range Missile

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

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.

Anne Pellegrino 0:22

And I am Anne Pellegrino, a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Jeffrey 0:27

You got out of jury duty.

Anne 0:29

I did. I was released on Friday, but I was supposed to report at 8.15 this morning. That's fantastic. But it's a Monday, so either way, you swing it. It's meh.

Jeffrey 0:42

Well, I am happy because test a missile, get a pod.

Anne 0:45

This is my first emergency missile pod.

Jeffrey 0:48

It is. It is. So did you drop everything, abandon the dog, and work on the missile all weekend?

Anne 0:54

No. I went scuba diving with friends.

Jeffrey 0:56

Okay. Okay. Did you find any missile parts underwater?

Anne 1:01

No.

Jeffrey 1:01

Okay, because up in space, we got a picture of the missile being fired.

Anne 1:06

Yeah, that's incredible.

Jeffrey 1:09

Yeah, so for listeners, North Korea over the weekend tested a short-range ballistic missile, probably a short-range ballistic missile. We'll walk you through what it was and where it was, but at least for me, the coolest part of the whole thing is that our friends at Planet Labs happened to have a dove right over the launch site just a few moments after it had launched, and you can see The big cloud from where the missile took off, and then you can see the smoky plume as it streaks to its target.

It's a one in a million shot, and as my friend Will Marshall, who's one of the founders of Planet, said, well, when you take a million pictures a day, you get one in a million shots.

Anne 1:53

Just the image itself is just beautiful.

Jeffrey 1:56

Well, I should thank Rob Simmon at Planet helped us make it pretty. Dave Schmerler, who's actually the one who noticed it. I'm so annoyed. I actually got up in the morning and I looked at Planet and they took two images of the site that morning. But I looked after the first one had posted, but before the second one had posted and the first one actually cut off at the peninsula.

And I was so mad. I closed my computer and it's like, I'm going to the Cinco de Mayo party. And then Dave, being a young man with...

Anne 2:31

Ample time.

Jeffrey 2:32

Ample time and maybe late night habits, got up rather later than I did. And when he opened his computer, both images were there. And sure enough, it was the big beautiful thing. And so I'm literally at this party... And I have six phone calls from Dave because I am not looking at my phone. And I think the party ends with me with the image on my phone and me holding it above my head, running out of the party, screaming, we got it, we got it, we got it.

Anne 3:03

And all of your friends. Are looking at you like a crazy person.

Jeffrey 3:09

One of my friends later did the worm. So as it turns out, I did not have the strangest behavior. There were alcohol and tacos. It was great. It was great. I had nine tacos at the taco truck.

Anne 3:23

They like small tacos?

Jeffrey 3:23

Yeah. But, you know, my PR is 12.

Anne 3:26

I had tacos on Saturday. Oh, I did. Yeah. Yeah. With the Mandos. So it ruined my party. Oh, I'm sorry. It did not ruin my day, but mainly because I just, you know... 5 p.m. on Friday hits and I just am not looking at Twitter or anything. And, you know, that's a good policy. But I missed out on this one.

Jeffrey 3:46

Unfortunately for us, North Koreans often test missiles on holidays and weekends, which I think is the segue to. Well, I guess first we should talk about what this thing was.

Anne 3:57

Yes. I also had a question about the launch location because it looks similar to me to where Kim Jong-un led the tactical weapons system test. Is that am I correct?

Jeffrey 4:12

No. Well, I don't know. I mean, this is the Hodo Peninsula. It's where they do lots of their short range missile tests. In fact, this is where they tested the extended range KNO2 a couple years ago. In fact, one of the early work in geolocation that I did was finding Kim right there. We used the islands behind him over his shoulder in an image to locate the place.

And that actually is what triggered the North Koreans starting putting up green screens. Behind Kim, so that we couldn't see where he was, which then leads to Dave spotting that, that tunnel, the, the highway tunnel from the sign highway tunnel. Yeah, right, forever be.

Anne 4:56

The number one case study that we show students. And they're like, oh my God, you can do that.

Jeffrey 5:01

Right. So for listeners who don't remember, Dave managed to spot a glimpse of a highway tunnel sign in the gap between the roof and the wall of the tent that Kim Jong-un was in, which then allowed us to geolocate him. So that was the kind of, the Hodo Peninsula geolocation is what pissed the North Koreans off. And then Dave broke them with that one.

But we've seen him there a couple of times. There's infrastructure there for testing. And so when North Korea did this test, It's naturally where we looked it's where we think that tactical test may have been but we weren't able I have not Dave and I aren't confident but the point is they do a lot of tests here so we were like we knew where to look

Anne 5:40

All right. So multiple systems were tested on Friday slash Saturday morning in North Korea. Now, the initial reporting that came out, it was unclear as to what those systems were, whether or not there were two systems. People thought, well, I don't really care about this test because it likely was it didn't include a ballistic missile of some kind.

Only then we find out later that it was likely a short range ballistic missile.

Jeffrey 6:07

Yeah, I think the South Koreans were really trying to downplay what was happening. So, you know, the original reporting that came out from Yonhap, you know, which is basically state media in South Korea, was that there were a series of, they initially said missiles, but then they changed it to projectiles. Which sounds way less scary. And there were a series of projectiles launched between 906 and 927, which is true because when the North Koreans came and later released the images, we saw that they did an artillery barrage.

And one of the Yonhap stories, you know, I don't know if you've ever noticed this, how they continually update Yonhap stories. And it's like, It's like breaking, and then it's like first lead, second lead, third lead, fourth lead. I think it's like the sixth lead. So as they kept rewriting the story... Way down there. Way down there, one of them says, oh, there are reports that there was another projectile fired around 10 a.m. Oh, okay.

So that was attributed to sources, but then the ROK Joint Chiefs of Staff would not confirm that. So really what that had the effect of doing was putting all the emphasis on the rocket artillery so that then they could say like, this isn't really a big deal. It's just rocket artillery. And it's not until, one, North Korea releases the picture of the missile, and two, until we get the image confirming that, like, oh, yes, they did, that we can sort of definitively say, like, hey, there was a missile that was fired after the artillery barrage, which I have to say has been kind of interesting because I keep talking to producers when we show them the image, and it always...

They always have the same question, which is, well, the ROK said the launch has happened between 906 and 927. So what makes you think this is the launch? And it's like, oh, the minimization strategy actually worked. And it's like, well, who are you going to believe, like the ROK JCS or your lion eyes? We have an image.

Like, I got a picture of the damn thing taken off. Like, what more do you want? So I think the ROK military... Was trying to downplay the event. But yes, North Korea released pictures. It's a short-range ballistic missile, and we should probably talk about what it is.

Anne 8:39

So this system looks very familiar, does it not?

Jeffrey 8:43

It's led to many jokes. Do you have a favorite nickname for it?

Anne 8:47

Oh... The Juche Iskander.

Jeffrey 8:52

The Juche Iskander, yeah.

Anne 8:54

It's a good one.

Jeffrey 8:54

Yeah. Ankit Panda is calling it the Songun Iskander. And there's a debate about whether it should be the Kimskander or the Iskimder.

Anne 9:05

Ooh, I like Iskimder.

Jeffrey 9:07

You like Iskimder? That's what Vip and Narang likes. And I like, so it doesn't work verbally, but I like Hunmu 2, but T-O-O, because it looks exactly like a South Korean Hunmu 2.

Anne 9:22

All right, so it looks like a Hunmu 2. It also looks like... An Iskander. Yeah.

Jeffrey 9:29

And I mean, I think it looks like the Grom, the Ukrainian Iskander. And I think it looks like the Lora, which is the... Israeli slightly smaller version of that, of that missile, I mean, and it even kind of looks a little bit like an Atacums. They're just so squat that there's, yeah, yeah, there's a whole family of, of stubby boosters with, with elongated warheads on them, and, and, and this is one of those. I, I don't know, and I, some people, I know, Marcus Schiller has been pointing to the visual resemblances to suggest that both the Songgun, Iskander, and the.

We've just been calling it, I should say, the unidentified SRBM, right, which we initially saw in a parade in February 2018. But Marcus had made the argument, which I just I'm not persuaded by, that the visual similarity between the Iskander, the North Korean system and the South Korean system suggests that they're all Russian. I just think they look alike because in this case, form follows function.

Anne 10:35

Okay. Now, what do we... Do we know, like, how far it went? Any dimensions? Like, what do we know about the system itself? Like, nothing? Or a little thing? A few things? Yeah, so... What material can we glean from this?

Jeffrey 10:52

So Adam Martin's not here today. I was going to make him measure the damn missile.

Anne 10:56

Tomorrow.

Jeffrey 10:57

For listeners, Adam Martin is one of our RAs who has been really working using mensuration tools that are available. Actually, in programs you probably have, like Photoshop. Photoshop has really nice mensuration tools that allow you to take into account perspective. So Adam's been really advancing our ability to model or to measure missiles. So I was going to have Adam measure it.

It's a tough measure, right? Because we haven't seen that many pictures. I know it flew at least 200 kilometers because we saw where it hit, right? The North Koreans released an image of that island and, you know, we know where that island is and it's in a general group of islands, rocky, they're not really islands, just rock outcroppings that the North Koreans use for target practice a lot.

But... You know, it's a pretty big rocket. I'm not sure. I mean, there's some debate about whether it's really a so-called close-range ballistic missile, which is this phrase DOD likes to capture things below 300 kilometers, or a short-range ballistic missile, which would be between 300 and 1,000 kilometers. But I... You know, I mean, I don't know. Like, the Ukrainian Iskander, the Grom, they export it saying that it's... 280, something like that.

Anne 12:22

Right, right.

Jeffrey 12:23

So it just gets right under the MTCR, but that the... You're not fooling anybody.

Anne 12:28

You're not fooling anyone. Turkey and China, you're not fooling anyone. Nobody's fooling anybody.

Jeffrey 12:37

Oh, look, it carries a 480 kilogram payload to 280 kilometers. It's not a Cat 1 system. Like, oh, come on.

Anne 12:43

Oh, wow.

Jeffrey 12:44

What happens if I take this brick that you duct taped to the outside off of it? How far does it fly then? Yeah. So I suspect we're going to find that it goes further than that. But, you know, I'm staring. I'm staring at the Ferrari. Yeah.

Anne 13:00

That's what I was getting to, our missile toolkit technology. What do we need to do in the next few days to be able to fly this thing? Somebody's got to measure it.

Jeffrey 13:10

For listeners, we're doing the podcast in my office, and we have the standalone computer with missile toolkit sitting on it.

Anne 13:17

It's just calling out to us.

Jeffrey 13:19

We just need some dimensions. We need some dimensions, and we'll fire it.

Anne 13:23

Are we going to get video footage of this launch, possibly?

Jeffrey 13:27

I think not yet.

Anne 13:28

No.

Jeffrey 13:29

I mean, it would help also if YouTube weren't nuking all of the DPRK social media accounts.

Anne 13:35

Yeah, it would. Hey, YouTube.

Jeffrey 13:38

Yeah, don't do that.

Anne 13:39

Knock it off.

Jeffrey 13:41

But I think Martin Williams, who, by the way, I should say Martin Williams saw the... Image in Planet Labs that we found too, and he put it on Twitter first so I, I have to give him credit. He is a person who monitors DPRK TV a ton and he put up a bunch of screenshots, but it was all still images. So keep my fingers crossed, yeah, some tracker action.

I wonder if listeners realize all of the little things. So what Anne is talking about is if we have a video of it taking off, we'll be able to measure its acceleration. That'll tell us its thrust. And then I think we'll feel really good about how far this thing can fly. Yeah. And we have to keep... Did we... Oh, we talked about atoms.

Anne 14:26

Yeah.

Jeffrey 14:27

Yeah. Or just if we have the audio. If we have the audio... Yes, that's right.

Anne 14:32

We talked about this in our last podcast that is not yet out yet.

Jeffrey 14:35

Right.

Anne 14:36

But we can... Well, theoretically, we can use the audio from videos to also measure acceleration.

Jeffrey 14:44

Yeah. So, you know, I just... I know it's only gone 200 kilometers. I suspect this is going to be a system that outperforms the KNO2. Because it visually looks like the Iskander, which replaced the Tochka in the Soviet Union. I suspect this will be the Songun Iskander that replaces the Toksa, which is the American nickname for the...

North Korean equivalent of the, of the, of the Tochka. So you know, that's a pretty standard developmental path. I can't imagine them implementing an entirely new missile only to give up range. That, that seems crazy to me. Right, right. So we got that. So that's the missile, and, and you know, then there's the question of what it all means. I guess so we should talk about reactions. Whose reaction?

Anne 15:43

Mike Pompeo's reaction, which the Trump administration's reaction struck me as odd and coming from a position of no leverage.

Jeffrey 15:57

Did you, did you hear, did you read Cheryl Rofer's piece on this?

Anne 16:01

No, I didn't.

Jeffrey 16:02

Oh, she referred to it as a la la la la la. I can't hear you. Yeah. So there's both the Trump tweet and, Which is bizarre. And then there is Mike Pompeo's appearance on one of the Sunday morning shows.

Anne 16:24

That was weird.

Jeffrey 16:24

Which was just weird for, like, a million reasons, including his reaction to that bizarre rumor that they had executed members of the negotiating team. You can see, like, beads of sweat dripping down and, like, the awkward laughter, just like... Well, you know, just like President Trump, Chairman Kim gets to pick his negotiators, like... As you just like try to loosen the tie around his neck oh my god it was horrible I have to say I'm not sure I believe the story that those executions happened but Pompeo's reaction to it was just bizarre but I you know I think that in both cases Anne right now is trying to scroll through Trump's Twitter page to find the offending tweet and she's just the faces she's making are incredible I think In both cases, there is a tendency to say, and this is literally what Pompeo said, you know, this missile can't travel very far.

It can't hit the United States. And it's true. All Kim promised to refrain from doing was conducting ICBM tests. Right. So it doesn't violate his pledge per se. Although I have to say when the secretary of state says, well, it can't hit us. So we don't care. It doesn't strike me as like, you know, the South Koreans, it turns out care, right?

The South Koreans have said that they think it's a violation of their agreements with the North Koreans. So it's like not a great look for the secretary of state. But I also think that it's a willful refusal to look facts in the face. And I've seen some of the commentary about this, how this is all aimed at South Korea.

And I'm sure partly it's aimed at South Korea. But just looking at the progress of... The way the North Koreans have signaled, right? They did the two. They've kind of gradually reintroduced some of the missile guys into propaganda. They, they did the two tactical weapons tests where they didn't really give us much data. Now they've kind of followed that with a missile test. You know, like Kim has said we have a year, or have until the end of the year, which is now, now a lot less than a year. It was a year when he said it, right, on New Year's Day. He said the, or no, it was after Hanoi, I guess. He said the Americans have to the end of the year. It was in April.

And I suspect that they're going to gradually increase the pressure, right? Because I don't think they're going to go from zero to 60. I think they're going to start moving up. And I understand that there's a desire to downplay this test. But I've lived through this before. In 2005 and 2006, North Korea had announced a missile moratorium in September 1999.

And in March 2005, they said they were no longer bound by it, right? Which is a lot like when Kim says you have a year to change your mind. And they started testing, actually, the KNO2, which is the system that I think that the Songun Iskander will replace. And they tested one in May 2005, and then they tested another one in March 2006.

And, you know, it was kind of interesting because even though North Korea had said they were no longer bound by the moratorium, the fact is they weren't testing long range missiles, right? They were really only testing these little short ones. And so the, there was a tendency then as now, I think to downplay the significance of these tests, you know, to say that like, well, they're short range, but the North Koreans are really waiting for the big stuff.

But then in, like, July 2006, like, the big stuff happened, right? They did a Taepodong 2 test. So, to me, I mean, it feels like Groundhog Day. Like, we're reliving this thing where Kim has said, you have a year. He is resuming small-level tests that are not a violation of the moratorium, but... Should, I think, clearly be understood as a warning that if negotiations don't get on track, we're going to go back to missile testing.

Anne 20:44

And I don't know why that's controversial, because he said it. There's a whole bunch of other systems that qualify as not ICBM range that we could see. So do you have any thoughts on that? What we might see next? Or what's this interim period, like in the post-test, what's going to happen there?

Jeffrey 21:07

Yeah, so you have this missile, which, you know, by the way, I think... We have been waiting for this test a long time. In October 2017, we saw burn scars at their solid propellant missile test stand. You could see them in the near-infrared imagery. So we knew they were doing engine testing of something new and solid. And our candidates were two things.

It was this new solid propellant rocket, which we then saw in the parade.

Anne 21:39

In February 2018.

Jeffrey 21:40

Right, so that's a candidate. But then the other candidate is North Korea has dramatically expanded the floor space at the Chemical Materials Institute, which is where they produce the airframes and the nozzles and the RVs for their missiles. And when Kim Jong-un visited that place, he stood in front of a poster for a Pukguksong-3 poster. Right. Which is probably going to be an extended range version of the Pukkuk Song series that we saw launched from the ocean and and then from that track vehicle.

So, you know, there are these two new solid propellant systems that are both under development. You know, it's always possible you get like something even bigger.

Anne 22:30

You know, it's not hard to stack things and play around, but, but at least for me, I'm, I'm kind of focused on the Pukuk Song Three. So it would behoove us to keep an eye on Shinpo. I have another site in mind. Yeah, I know, but I wasn't gonna like blast it out for everybody. I know of the other site.

I just wasn't going to...

Jeffrey 22:54

I definitely would keep an eye on Shinpo.

Anne 22:55

Yeah.

Jeffrey 22:56

There's definitely stuff happening at Shinpo. There's a lot of construction. Things are moving around. There's... That's definitely on my list. But, you know, then there's the other place.

Anne 23:06

The other place.

Jeffrey 23:07

There's the other place.

Anne 23:08

That would be... Huh. So, you know, I don't know. Or, you know, they could launch it from the land.

Jeffrey 23:13

They could launch it from the land for sure. They could just put it in a canister and pop it up off one of those ugly trucks.

Anne 23:19

So I could see they either want either they will test it at a known location where they want people to see it and get that. That rush or they want the surprise. New location.

Jeffrey 23:35

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the advantage of this is not totally, totally shocking. I mean, other people have noticed that there's a what appears to be a launch barge on the West Coast. And so it would not be totally surprising if they were to test something from that. That would give them more sea room, because they could fire it from the water over the peninsula into, I guess it's not technically sea room, but they'd have more space.

They could fire it over the peninsula from the west coast into the east sea slash sea of Japan. Don't at me. Don't at me with your place names. So, you know, I don't know. I think it could be interesting. But, you know, the reality is there's a lot of expansion of their solid propellant infrastructure going on right now.

And, you know, like those people, like they're showing up for work. They got to do something.

Anne 24:34

We are returning to the good old days of 2017.

Jeffrey 24:38

Hey, it at least gives us something to pot about.

Anne 24:42

Indeed. Well, I think that's a pod. You think that's a pod? I think that's a pod. Okay, great.

Jeffrey 24:50

Well, Anne, thanks for joining me.

Anne 24:54

Thank you for having me. Well, I guess I'm a co-host now, so you're stuck with me.

Jeffrey 24:58

Yeah, we can't get rid of you. There's probably some band choke, right? Where they brought in a bassist and the bassist ends up owning the band. I think it's... I think Three Dog Night, the drummer, ended up as the only one in the band owning the name.

Anne 25:22

What? No. Not landing.

Jeffrey 25:29

Right. No. Bad joke. So, you just don't know who Three Dog Night is. No, of course not. There we go. Okay. Anne, thank you for joining me.

Anne 25:40

Happy to be here.

Jeffrey 25:42

And thank you for listening. If you like the podcast, you can support us by becoming a Patreon patron. That's $5 a month. You get access to our Slack channel and you get access to a series of shorter podcasts called Brilliant Pebbles. That price actually goes down to $3 a month if you're a student. So head on over to Patreon.com Dot com slash ACW podcast and check it out. All right. oh, this is actually where I'm supposed to say, and thanks for joining me. Happy to be here, and thank you for listening.