Israeli Rocket Motor Test

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

There was this like minor international incident that we caused. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control disarmament and nonproliferation. 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.

Aaron Stein 0:25

And I'm Aaron Stein, Director of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. And if anybody hears a couple of squiggles or... What, baby talk? And I guess in the background, that's because my daughter decided not to take a nap. And so here she is eating some bread on my lap during the recording of this podcast. And another disclaimer, they've also decided to build a house right next to mine.

So if you hear any banging in the background, that's because my property values are going up, but for the momentary displeasure of loud voices. Well, I like to think of her as an intern, Aaron. Didn't we call my son the junior fellow when he was home? Yeah.

Jeffrey 1:01

Yeah.

Aaron 1:02

But she's younger. So that's true. And this is COVID living and that I have nothing to do with her. And we have to bang this podcast out because things have been happening in Israel.

Jeffrey 1:11

Oh my gosh. So exciting. Social media has opened up some new vistas. So for listeners, you will probably have seen this on my Twitter feed by the time the podcast comes out. But yeah, There was a big mushroom cloud that someone with a cell phone was able to record in Israel. And someone posted it on Twitter and said, oh, my gosh, there's been a large explosion.

And immediately there were a bunch of stories in Israeli media, including Haaretz and the Times of Israel, all of which reported that there was an explosion. It was at a facility operated by a company called Tomer or Tomer. I don't know. But that's an Israeli defense firm that was created as Israel has begun to privatize some of its defense companies.

This is this is a thing that is involved in solid propellant rocket motors, among other systems. And they issued a statement saying, no, no, no, it was just a routine event. No big deal. And so immediately, given the field that we work in, people got pretty conspiratorial. Imagining that this was some kind of, you know, sabotage that was retaliation for what's been going on in Iran and so on and so forth.

Funny mix, by the way. Some people who were horrified at the idea that it might be retaliation and then a fair number of people who were maybe too gleeful for my taste.

Aaron 2:44

Yeah, I was when I first saw it. My first instinct went to, did we have another Mogadah? You know, perhaps in a little bit better burb facility to protect the people who were there. But I was like, did something blow up that it shouldn't? But then quite quickly, I think we realized it didn't, based mostly in part to work you and the team were doing.

Jeffrey 3:07

Yeah, so, I mean, the first thing to say is, we can just spoil it, it was just a solid rocket motor test. And this is kind of a nice illustration of how in the bad old days, before there was information, conspiracies can fly. I mean, I guess they'd still fly and they'd still get around. But now at least we have open source information for those of us who care about the truth.

It was a solid rocket motor test. And... The kind of first hint was the video itself. Even though people said it was an explosion, there wasn't an explosion in the video. There was a big cloud of smoke. There was a kind of bright color that looked like flame, and there was this low rumble. And so, you know, at worst it was a fire. But then it's a fire that goes out, right? And, and to me, that looked like Every horizontal solid rocket motor test I'd ever seen in my life in the United States.

Aaron 4:07

Right. And I think, well, I think that the thing that ultimately made it newsworthy is that we don't get to see these things in Israel all that much because of the secrecy around this stuff.

Jeffrey 4:18

Well, I think that's exactly right. And in fact, you know, some of the, one of the conspiracy theorists, you know, it's like, I've lived in Israel and I've never seen anything like that before. And it's like, well, you know, You probably didn't live in just the right spot. And, you know, you just may not have noticed it because they don't, it doesn't last very long.

You know, a burn is at most going to be a few minutes, you know. And so if you don't, if you're not there, if you don't hear the rumble of the burn and look out and see the cloud right away, you know, you're not going to notice it. What's different now, of course, is that we have cell phones where people can record things.

So this I thought was really fun because a couple of weeks ago, there was this like minor international incident that we caused.

Aaron 5:10

I remember this. This is a good arms control long story. And this was fun.

Jeffrey 5:15

Yeah, so we had this grant from Plowshares where we were mapping Israel's ballistic missile programs and infrastructure. And that's now done and whatever. One thing is once we had all the locations mapped out, I went and worked with Planet to task a bunch of satellite images. And right after there had been that story about Damona, which also someone else had seen it, but we had also tasked it, One of my other tasks pops up in the planet database and Haaretz freaks out, right?

There's this guy who's like, someone is tasking satellite photographs of highly sensitive facilities. And it was like, well, you know, the Kyle Bingaman had come off and you can now get high resolution images of Israel. So I'm making up for lost time.

Aaron 6:06

Yeah, it wasn't the Iranians. It was Jeffrey Lewis.

Jeffrey 6:11

But the funny thing was, Is that site that caused that incident was this place because it has a solid rocket motor test stand. And I wanted to get a good high resolution image of the thing. And so, you know, we now have, for reference, a nice recent high resolution image. And I was able to go and look at, you know, planets taken basically, actually had really good coverage.

Did have, in fact, daily coverage of the site. And we could see that on April 20th, the same day that video was posted, the grass on the kind of edge of the solid rocket motor test stand takes a beating.

Aaron 6:58

Yeah, and you have some, like, there's more to that. Like, they're not straight up photos, I remember. You know, is that there was a little bit of things that you guys did to, I guess, really to confirm, but ultimately to get clear images of what was going on.

Jeffrey 7:13

Yeah, so the, by the time this comes out, I'll have published this. You can see a little discoloration, but the, you know, the grass is already kind of, you know, kind of brownish. And so when you kind of burn that grass, it burns off and you have like some dirt left. It's really hard to see the color.

So it looked to us using a typical optical image like it, like the kind of area had maybe gotten like a little bit bigger that was not grassy. But we downloaded two, a pair of three meter images and they're four bands. They have a near infrared band and we false colored them. And so when you do a near infrared band you know, it's what, it's a crazy thing.

We all think that like plants and trees are green, but what they really reflect is near infrared wavelengths of light. It's just, we can't see those with our eyes. But the satellite can. And so we turned all the foliage to green or to red rather. And when we did that, then the burn scar pops out and you can see it's this black burn scar.

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. It's a really nice case study, to be honest, about the value of three meter imagery, because it is nice that I had the 50 centimeter high resolution image as like a reference to know kind of what things are. But having those pictures every day is enough to be able to establish with high confidence that there's a solid rocket motor test on April 20th.

And you know, like I wouldn't want to wait a week or a month for a high resolution image. Like the three meter was good enough.

Aaron 8:51

Do we have any idea what the what the rocket motor, the solid rocket motor was designed for?

Jeffrey 8:59

Hard to say. Honestly, one thing we had looked at is seeing if, from plumes, we could work out what we were looking at. It turns out it's really hard from burn scars to tell.

Aaron 9:13

You guys had a burn scar database. I know that one exists. We did.

Jeffrey 9:17

We did. It's highly dependent on a whole bunch of things. Like is the, is the, the ground flat? What's the soil like? There's just a whole bunch of stuff like that that makes it really complicated. It was big is, is kind of my answer. And, you know, we only got part of the burn. If we'd actually had a whole video of the whole burn, I could have told you how long it burned, and then I'd be able to identify it.

But my guess is it's a motor for a Jericho 2 or a Chavit. Yeah. Would be my guess.

Aaron 10:00

Is there anything else that we should hit? I mean, this is kind of a short one, but like... Two more things.

Jeffrey 10:07

All right. So I went I looked at the a lot of the early press reporting said that this thing was an explosion at a Tomer facility in Ramla. And there there there there is a rocket. There's a rocket missile plant in Ramla that people don't talk very much about. And there's also an IAI plant right there. I checked out both those facilities.

They're fine. There were no kind of explosion. So we're able to check that off. And we then set about once once it was like, OK, one has a burn scar. The others do not have any kind of damage. I had two of my colleagues at CNS who are students and graduate research assistants go ahead and geolocate the video.

So a huge shout out to Aram Shabanian and Blake Vincent. Who basically nailed the general area and then they ran it by a colleague online. Because this morning I was like, are we sure this is exactly the spot? And they're like, no, it's approximately the spot. And then a colleague on Twitter, well, I'll give credit on Twitter.

He's anonymous. Went ahead and actually finished and got the exact spot. And then I spent this morning checking like little buildings and being like, yes. So we know where the video was taken from and we know it's looking at the solid motor test stand. So like that, I mean, to me, that conversation is now over, right? Like it was, I mean, it's a funny thing Tomer said it was a routine event and, and like that, like had like zero impact on, on the news coverage of this event.

But they're telling the truth. You know, when you look at the open source information, it's just a solid rocket motor test, which is cool and interesting for us. But it's not sabotage. It's, it's, it's not, not spooky. It's a, it's a pretty normal event. And You know, an example of the kind of work you can do when you build knowledge, right?

Like we had that grant from Plowshares to map the infrastructure. And so when there's an event like this, we don't have to look all over Israel. We can say like, okay, that looks like a solid rocket motor test. If it is, that would happen here. Look here and see if you can confirm that's the video or see if you can see a burn scar.

And it's like, check, check.

Aaron 12:31

Right, and then the geolocation ultimately probably confirms your hunch about where it took place.

Jeffrey 12:37

Yeah, that's right. I mean, the burn scar plus the geolocation is, to my mind, you know, just case closed. But, you know, the other thing, which I think is really interesting, and it comes out of the international incident aspect, is people are really freaked out That Israel has to live with the same transparency as everyone else. And, you know, so us taking a picture of a rocket motor test stand, which is, you know, like, I got lots of pictures of Iranian rocket motor test stands and American rocket motor test stands.

It really caused a lot of panic or maybe panic is too strong. But, you know, there were there were concerns. And this guy, Harel Dan, who is the guy who figured out you can use interference with synthetic aperture radar images to spot radars associated with Patriot. Oh, yeah.

Aaron 13:41

I know this account. It's a great account.

Jeffrey 13:42

Yeah, he's awesome. His comment on this, I think, is actually the big takeaway, right? Because, you know, he was reacting to our work and the statement that the Israeli officials had issued, which was so vague as to really invite speculation, right? And he did it in Hebrew, and so I'm working, I'm kind of cleaning up a Google Translate, but essentially what he said was, just imagine for a moment if instead of inviting speculation, The Ministry of Defense just said, we did a solid rocket motor test.

Aaron 14:22

Right, exactly.

Jeffrey 14:24

And he said, but no, you know, this is like opium for people in power. And then he ends with, greetings from democratic space. Like...

Aaron 14:36

Of course, the backdrop is that the Israelis are quite openly and overtly, if still not taking direct credit for running a sabotage campaign against the Iranian nuclear program. Alara has lots of words on that. So that whenever there is an incident like this, it's confirmation bias that perhaps we're on an escalatory cycle towards greater conflict. You know what I mean?

Jeffrey 15:01

Yeah. Yeah. But I do. I think it would have been the easiest thing in the world for them to say, you know... Like, it's not... It shouldn't be a secret that Israel has space... Well, it's not a secret that Israel has space launchers, and it's not a secret that those space launchers, or it certainly shouldn't be a secret that those space launchers also have their military analogs.

And so why can't you just say, yeah, we did a solid rocket motor test? I mean, you all saw it. Here's a picture of it. Like, what... I mean, I don't know. I do think that it's about culture, right? It really is about the allure. I mean, it's funny because we often think of opacity in Israel or secrecy as something that was negotiated with the United States.

But I think there are people who like it. They're addicted to it, even when it's not in their interest.

Aaron 15:58

And perhaps we'll wrap up here because we're tempting fate with a very loud outburst. It's not just the nuclear program that's shrouded in opacity. It's the missiles that carry those nuclear weapons. There's just not very much out there. I mean, I think you're doing a lot of the front end work on that. And so I'm sure it does make a lot of people uncomfortable when somebody's looking around.

And then the transparency is such that you can know when somebody is looking around. It's no longer that difficult to understand that somebody was taking pictures. So it all kind of fits together. I hope this sounds okay. Okay. To our dear listeners we really do try our best but we're really just two dudes sitting in our houses in a pandemic with kids running around at our feet and we can't really control the environmentals and we're not in a sound studio although maybe at some point we will be so with that thanks for putting up with us if you like this you want more patreon.com slash acw podcast The Patreon keeps the show running as a little gift for either a $3 or $5 donation.

Depending if you're a student or not, you can join our Slack channel where lots of discussions happen about things around this. And if you don't want to give, the five-star reviews on Apple help us. So smash the five-star button. It helps. It pushes us up. And we can raise the show's profile even further, unlike the Israeli nuclear program.

So with that, Jeffrey, thanks for taking the time and putting up with my dog eating bread on camera here.

Jeffrey 17:39

It was a pleasure.

Aaron 17:41

Thanks, everybody, for listening.