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
0:06
Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. And I'm Anne Pellegrino, an independent analyst in Monterey, California, and world famous baker. What's in the oven?
Anne Pellegrino
0:32
Well, it's been a while since we've been on a pod together. So I've got a couple, I've had a couple bakes. That olive bread that I gave you, which I never heard if that was good. Okay, it was good. I texted you that I ate the entire thing in like two days. No, you didn't.
Jeffrey
0:49
It was delicious.
Anne
0:50
Okay, great. I'm glad you liked it. And then I just made some plain loaves last week. But I've got a long list of things to bake because listeners have been sending me recipes, which is very nice. That is fantastic. Yeah.
Jeffrey
1:09
Could we encourage listeners to send us latlongs for nuclear facilities? It's nice that you're helping with Anne's baking, but...
Anne
1:18
I got a tahini chocolate cake recipe, which I'm excited to try, but haven't been able to do that to myself because I know I would just eat the entire thing.
Jeffrey
1:33
Well, I wonder, you know, have you made donuts yet?
Anne
1:38
We tried to make donut holes, and I just failed miserably at it, so...
Jeffrey
1:43
Because that's been the thing I've been saying about the topic we're going to discuss today, which is we may have found out where North Korea makes the donuts.
Anne
1:54
Oh, yes. The Wollo-ri suspected nuclear facility.
Jeffrey
2:03
Yes, yes. So for listeners, we have an analysis out on arms control wonk that got picked up by CNN using some satellite images taken by Planet, looking at a facility in the excerpts of Pyongyang that seems, according to Ankit Panda's reporting, to be a nuclear warhead assembly facility. They make either the warheads or the components. Yes.
Anne
2:29
Okay, so a couple things I want to know. So I think in the article on Arms Control Wonk, y'all indicated that you started looking at this facility way back in 2015. So that's a good five years of monitoring this site. And then, like, why now did this come out?
Jeffrey
2:54
Right. So the easy answer to why now, before I tell the tale of how we came to focus on this place, is it looked suspicious to us in 2015. It kept looking suspicious to us. And we probably would never have published it in the public domain. But Ankit Panda has this new book out called Kim Jong-un and the Bomb, which is incredible.
And in it, he reports that there is a nuclear warhead assembly facility near Wallow Re. And so given that we have been staring at this facility at Wallow Re thinking it looked like a nuclear facility for five years, and that Ankit seems to now have the reporting that says the US government thinks that's what it does. Like there was no point in keeping it a secret anymore.
It wasn't just Dave and my little spot. Back and forth, yeah. Although we have other little spots.
Anne
3:59
So the area of Wollo-ri, what piqued your interest about that facility originally?
Jeffrey
4:06
Yeah. So in 2015, Melissa Hanham was writing this article on the Pyongyang Biotechnical Facility, which was an interesting spot. And so in the course of doing that, I found myself trying to geolocate a whole bunch of research facilities that might be involved in geolocation. I won't just say a biological weapons program, but in that entire industry in North Korea, since there are a bunch of facilities that aren't, I don't mean to say that they're all bioweapons facilities, but we wanted to kind of map that.
And so that required looking at different places around Pyongyang, and in the course of that, I bumped into this place called Wallowree that just looked so strange. It has a really strong security perimeter. It has the full compliment of monuments that you see at, National defense facilities. It had these really big buildings that looked like housing. There's something next to one of the buildings.
It's really hard to see in the satellite images, but I mean, I just, now it looks like it's a playground, which would suggest it's housing. It might just be some really terrible, you know, communist sculpture. Yeah. And it's set in this kind of against this hill and it looks like there's entrances to what could be an underground facility and there are vehicles going in and out all the time.
And it just looked so damn weird. So we put a pin in it and kept watching it and watching it and watching it. Found historical images, realized it had been greatly expanded in 2000 and was just focused. And then one day, actually I was at the gym and I get a text message from Ankit. And Ankit says, hey, Have you heard about a site near a place called Wallow Re that's involved in nuclear warhead manufacture?
Jeffrey
6:14
And there's only two things there, okay? There's this site we couldn't identify, and there's a spring water, like they bottle water. And Kim Jong-un has visited it, and it's got, it's a legit facility. And it's like, yeah, there's something sitting next to the bottled water plant, and we have no idea what it is, but it looks like a nuclear facility.
And so those two things came together. And, you know, still we were prepared to sit on it. But Ankit is very confident in his reporting that the U.S. government believes that there is a facility in Wollo-ri involved in the manufacture of nuclear warheads or components, or at least some aspects of the U.S. intelligence community. And so when the book came out, we thought it would be appropriate to identify the site we'd found.
Anne
7:01
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And Kim sometimes has a trend of making seemingly innocuous visits to civilian facilities that that's how often you and Dave come across other more suspicious looking facilities, right? As he makes this visit and you're like, okay, let's go look in this area and see what else could be around there.
Jeffrey
7:27
It was definitely notable to us that he went out to the spring water factory and And didn't double up. Mm-hmm. You know, I mean, that happens. I'm not saying that that alone is enough, but it kind of piqued our interest. Like, here's this other factory sitting right next to it, and we can't find any record of him making a visit ever.
Anne
7:50
Like, theoretically... Well, theoretically, if, you know, we're going to talk about this in more detail in a bit, but the pushback that was pretty immediate that this was actually a military training facility, that would be a place that you would publicly visit.
Jeffrey
8:08
Theoretically. Yeah, yeah. We have Kim visiting military facilities like that. So, you know. It doesn't mean. No, it doesn't mean.
Anne
8:18
Nothing, but it doesn't mean.
Jeffrey
8:20
Yeah, I mean, what I would say is that, and we can go through all the signatures associated with it that really struck us, but it's just really strange. You have this big facility with these really big, I mean, five, six-story buildings, right? And then, you know, there's another tall building, which is, I think, more than six stories.
Just sort of sitting here out in the middle of nowhere. You know, it doesn't look like any of the surrounding area. Big security perimeter. And, like, nobody's ID'd it. Nobody's been there. They haven't done any, you know, press on it. And it just, at least to me, the part that was kind of really intriguing is it sits next to a normal facility.
Jeffrey
9:07
You know, the normal practice is people know what the facility is. If it makes products, those products are advertised. There are pictures of the facility. There are descriptions of the facility. It can visit and the visits are announced. There's no security perimeter. There's no on-site housing. The facility it sits next to is totally innocent looking. And this thing is like utterly unlike it in every possible way.
Anne
9:34
Yeah, yeah. Were there any, like, ground images of the spring water factory that you could potentially see in the background?
Jeffrey
9:47
They seem to be pretty careful about not photographing it. I could go back and look, I guess, again, just to make 100% sure that we didn't miss anything. But, yeah, the spring water stuff was... Sort of contained and eaten away. So it was really interesting. One other thing I would say is that we really changed how we felt about it.
It went from being something that we thought was suspicious to suspicious that it might be a nuclear facility after the identification of the enrichment facility at Kangsong. Because this facility looks like that one.
Anne
10:28
Okay, so what's the comparison?
Jeffrey
10:30
Big security perimeter, big buildings that we think are probably for housing that are inside the security perimeter. The fact that Kangsong was just outside of Pyongyang was not something we would have expected. We were always expecting the secret enrichment plant to be in the middle of nowhere like Yongbyon is. Once we realized that no, there are nuclear facilities around Pyongyang, or at least there can be, And they're going to look a certain way, which is to say they'll be surrounded by a security perimeter set off from the surrounding area.
They won't match the surrounding area. They won't look like the surrounding area. They'll have the kind of monuments that indicate that they're important, but there won't be any publicized visits. Then we were like, wow, this facility really looks like that. Now, I will say that it's older. The oldest picture we can find of it is from 2000, and some of the buildings are already there.
But all of the big buildings are getting built. And so whether that means it was an old facility that was repurposed or an old facility that was expanded, I don't know. But it's older than Kangseon.
Anne
11:50
I think one of the compelling Bits of your analysis for me was the reporting from Courtney Kuby and Carol Lee about the window of construction that was occurring at this facility. Was that the only facility in the area where you saw that kind of construction in that window?
Jeffrey
12:17
Yeah. Ankit Panda has a really nice article coming out in NK News that kind of starts to delve into this because According to OnKit's sources, and this is consistent with what we see, North Korea has one stockpile site where it stores warheads. And that stockpile site is up near Kusong, and it's a previously identified place, and we'll probably write a report on it in a week or two when we get around to it.
But in his book, he implies that there are some people in the intelligence community who think that North Korea either might have secondary storage locations or might be considering secondary storage locations. And the two places he mentions are Hagop, which is an underground facility that we've talked about, And Wollo-ri, and that's the context in which it comes up.
So when we talked to Ankit about that idea that there is maybe not clarity throughout the entire US government about what this site does, that maybe there is some debate, Then I went back and thought about that Courtney Kuby, Carol Lee is the other co-author. I'll make sure I credit them both. I thought about that story because we had initially looked for the entrances that they said had been constructed.
In a particular time period, we looked for those at Yongdok, at the stockpile site, and we couldn't find them, and we didn't see them. And we just didn't understand this claim that North Korea was hiding the entrances to underground facility where warheads were stored, because the place we think of as warheads being stored, there just wasn't that kind of change.
And then when we went and we looked, we saw that there was really substantial construction in that time period at Walori, You never really know. I mean, one of the big challenges we have is none of the information is exactly right when it filters out to a reporter. So is it that the person thought it was a warhead storage facility?
Is it the person thought that the construction of the entrances might Might hint at a future role as a warhead storage facility. I don't know because all I have is their reporting. But at least for us, it was one more thing to be confident about. Not confident because it's really hard. It's one more data point that suggests that this really might be the facility in question.
Okay. I mean, again, let me say, we would never have published this if it weren't for OnKit having a source anonymously saying, like, there is such a facility in this place. Because for us, that changed our calculation pretty dramatically. Because now, if somebody comes to me and says, well, an anonymous source has told OnKit Panda that there is a warhead production facility in this place, Have you seen anything like that?
You know, if any of you have kids, have you seen my hat? Like, yes, I have seen a hat like that. Like there is a facility in that place. And so we felt, you know, we had to say like, yeah, there is a facility that really freaking looks like that and happens to match this other report too, which, you know.
Anne
15:33
It's compelling. Maybe we'll get in and maybe it's an annex to the bottled water factory. I don't know.
Jeffrey
15:41
Yeah, you can be wrong in this business. I mean, that's the one thing, you know, if I say I have 90% confidence, that means, you know, one out of 10 CNN stories is going to be wrong.
Anne
15:53
Well, you're still getting at least 10 CNN stories, so.
Jeffrey
15:56
Yeah, well, but I mean, we do, I think we want to be careful about saying, you know, that there's a way of looking at these facilities and it causes us to have certain suspicions and, you know, you're not going to be right all the time. Right. That's okay. But on the other hand, we see so many facilities associated with the North Korean nuclear and missile program that don't seem to be reported.
And all you can do is pin them, characterize them, and, you know, over time, try to build confidence in them, which, you know, turned out to work pretty well for us with Sanamdong.
Anne
16:33
Well, should we talk about... What else it could be.
Jeffrey
16:38
Yeah, the pushback. I.e.
Anne
16:39
The pushback that came.
Jeffrey
16:41
So interesting.
Anne
16:43
So yes, you mentioned that before we were recording that the kind of immediacy with which you received pushback was curious.
Jeffrey
16:58
Yes. Well, so for listeners, the Daily NK, which is a news outlet that often presents rumors and other information from inside North Korea, which, by the way, is – I love the Daily NK. Reporting in North Korea is hard, right? So when I say that they traffic in rumors, I – I don't mean that as like an insult, like that's how information gets around and you have to be attentive to that.
They quoted a North Korean military source as saying it was a political military academy or college of the Air Defense Corps. So what struck us about that, well, it struck me at least, is how quickly that pushback came. That story was on CNN yesterday. And that means that people got up in the morning in Seoul, saw the story, and Placed phone calls to well, place phone calls, send emails, I don't know, to someone in North Korea and got a comment back. That's fast, fast. And then got the story up. So you know, and I'm not saying that that's not possible, but.
We haven't seen other stories get such a quick comment. And you know, the person, it's interesting because the person clearly identifies the site. You know, they identify the reservoir that's there. They say it's next to a hill with a lot of graves. But then they say some things that are not true. You know, they say that there aren't any tall buildings.
Anne
18:46
Yeah, I was gonna ask about that.
Jeffrey
18:48
Yeah, there are a lot of tall buildings there. I mean, we can see them.
Anne
18:51
Because I also imagine, I assume that you measured them.
Jeffrey
18:55
Well, I can count the floors and I can see the shadows. I mean, you're right, I didn't measure them. I could see the giant shadows that they cast. And, you know, the person said that there wasn't an underground facility, which, you know, to be fair, what we see are parking structures up against a hillside, which is a typical configuration for an entrance to a UGF.
But, you know, for all we know, the thing goes in, you know, six inches or something. I don't know. But to me, honestly, it didn't look like... An academy. There are two military or at least state-oriented educational institutions nearby. And so that was actually a possibility we had considered. Typically for like an academy like that, you would expect to see a parade ground.
Anne
19:49
Okay, when you said it was specifically for like an air defense core, I don't know what the signatures are for what one of those facilities would actually look like, but I immediately had some thoughts about what would potentially be there that I did not see, you know, just even at a quick glance of the satellite imagery.
Jeffrey
20:11
Yeah, I mean, it's not what it looks. It just, it doesn't look like that. So it doesn't have... It doesn't have a parade ground, which you would typically expect to see. And, you know, the vehicle traffic in and out is a little weird because you wouldn't expect to see like trucks coming in. And I mean, I mean, so maybe you could, if people are living on site, you know, but it, again, it doesn't look like the military educational institute that is across the road.
I mean, there is such a thing. I mean, the person describes it perfectly. So they're not confused about which sites, you know, because they say it's on the right-hand side of the road going in a particular direction. It's set against a hill. There are a bunch of graves on the hill. There's a reservoir. I mean, the person describes it ideally, but then says, you know, that there's no, he describes like four buildings and there are a lot more buildings on site than that.
And he says, you know, the housing is all one story and it's just, it's not. So, you know, look, I, I don't want to be negative at all about Daily NK because they get information that you can't get any other way. And I think it just comes with certain risks. Daily NK was the source of the Kim Jong-un is ill story.
Jeffrey
21:36
Now, to be fair, they never said he was dead, right? They said he had a procedure and was recuperating, which, sure, maybe, right? For sure. They didn't say anything ridiculous. So what they say doesn't quite make sense to me, what the source says. But on the other hand, I'm not totally dismissing it. I mean, I think the kind of takeaway from it is, you know, North Korea does have nuclear weapons, right?
And they build them somewhere. And, you know, Onkit's reporting says this is the place where they either build the warheads or some of the components. And so, you know, if you got to a situation where they were gonna disarm, you'd probably need to go take a look at this place.
Anne
22:20
Yeah, yeah. Well, I was going to say, you know, when you're dealing with North Korea or really with any actor, like you can't have a complete picture. It's just impossible from where we sit currently. Yeah.
Jeffrey
22:34
And I mean, I'm mindful of the experience which you took in my China class.
Jeffrey
22:39
In the 1960s when the U.S. misidentified the fuel production plant at Baotou as a plutonium production reactor.
Anne
22:46
That was a good case study. I, you know...
Jeffrey
22:49
Things look like things, but you don't really know until you get there.
Anne
22:52
Yeah. Yeah. Hmm, I could think of a way for that to happen. But, you know, wishful thinking.
Jeffrey
22:59
I mean, there is a part of me that hopes that we're fantastically wrong. And Kim just says, yes, come visit. It turns out it, you know, really is an academy. But I don't know. I do have my doubts.
Anne
23:12
When pigs fly.
Jeffrey
23:15
We'll see. You know, I will say there are two things. One is... I do think it is important in our business to be wrong for the right reasons, right? Which is to say to have good method and be transparent about your method and then let the chips fall where they may. So, you know, when I look at this facility, to me, it does not look like, it does not look like an educational institution.
But, you know, a broader point, which does matter a lot to me is, The kind of evidence that you're looking for, I think, depends on the policy that someone is pushing. You know, if somebody said, we need to attack North Korea right now because this facility is making nuclear warheads, I would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
How do you exactly know? I can see it and, you know, yeah, it looks suspicious to me, but like... You know, you don't really know unless you're there. And, you know, they would say, well, you know, the U.S. government, you know, some aspects think it is. And I would say, oh, and that's a very plausible thing for them to think.
But, you know, slow down. But by contrast, if you're imagining designing a denuclearization effort, then like, yeah, the evidence is like plenty good enough to put this on a list.
Jeffrey
24:38
And so I do think that sometimes the reaction that we get online is driven by people who are imagining that we're suggesting that the US attack a nuclear-armed North Korea. And if your point is like, well, you're not 100% certain, then I would say, yeah, we're not 100% certain. But I do think it is interesting that somebody in the US intelligence community thinks there's such a facility at Wollo-ri.
And I can't find a better candidate. So here we are.
Anne
25:10
This is a good one. This is, you know, it's been kind of quiet on the DPRK OSINT front. So this has given everybody something to kind of salivate over.
Jeffrey
25:23
Well, when it's quiet on the outside, it just means we're pinning stuff quietly to ourselves.
Anne
25:28
Which I hear there could be some other things coming out based on Ankit's book.
Jeffrey
25:35
Oh yeah. I mean, on kit. So there is a place called young duck tongue, which on kit identifies as the main storage site. It had previously been identified. It's referred to in passing in a few articles. But we actually pinned it a couple of years ago and we've kind of never like made a big deal out of the facility.
But since it's in the book, I mean, at this point you might as well like go show people, go show people the thing. And the best part about the book, we're just selling copies of Kim Jong-un and the bomb. The best part about the book is he's got the full list of KN missile designators.
Anne
26:19
Oh, thank God.
Jeffrey
26:20
So not only does it clear a bunch of stuff up, but if you read it carefully, you can find all kinds of new programs. So as a consequence of Unkit's book, Scott LaFoy and I, teasing a future podcast, have been doing a little paper on the past, present, and future of DPRK air-launched cruise missiles. Because it's a thing.
Anne
26:47
It's a thing, but it, yeah.
Jeffrey
26:49
In the 80s, they did an air-launched Silkworm. And one of those KN designations is for an air-launched KH-35. So read Ankit's book. It is chock full of information that I believe should have remained classified.
Anne
27:08
I got to get my copy.
Jeffrey
27:10
You can pre-order it now. And, and, and, You know, I think we are going to be learning a lot of new things about North Korea's nuclear and missile programs as we go through that book really carefully and digest all of the revelations. With the idea being that there is a facility that makes warheads or warhead components at Wallow Reef, merely being the amuse-bouche facility.
Anne
27:40
Your patience is paying off. It's exciting to see. So I can't wait for more juicy podcasts.
Jeffrey
27:48
Well, you know, if you like juicy podcasts and you want us to keep making juicy podcasts and you, you know, are intrigued by the idea of a Slack community. Of people who share a love of juicy podcasts and all kinds of weird stuff, you can support us at patreon.com slash acwpodcast for $5 a month, three if you are a student.
You will help us continue making these podcasts and get access to our excellent Slack channel.
Anne
28:26
And paying my health insurance. So thank you all.
Jeffrey
28:31
Keep in Annie Pellegrino in yeast.
Anne
28:38
Yes, also helping with my baking habit. Yes, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey
28:42
Thank you for joining me.
Anne
28:45
It's always a pleasure.
Jeffrey
28:47
And thank you for listening. Thank you.
