Gimme Shelter

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

You are listening to the Arms Control Wong podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:19

And I'm Aaron Stein, Director of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Jeffrey 0:23

How you doing, Aaron?

Aaron 0:24

I'm doing okay. How are you?

Jeffrey 0:26

Good, good. I'm here teaching winter term at Middlebury College in Vermont and took my kids sledding the other day and ran into some people from Philadelphia who noted that you have no snow.

Aaron 0:42

We had snow for like three hours and then it all melted away. So we're in a much better position than you are.

Jeffrey 0:48

Yeah, so this semester I'm trying to do a project-based class during our winter term on open source tools with a special emphasis on North Korea. And so against my wishes, this ended up being f***ing Missile Week.

Aaron 1:08

It's been a lot. You know, like we were talking off pod, I can't keep the date straight, you know, because people count on us to get these things right. And I was like, was it two weeks ago? Was it a week ago? Because they've just been doing it every single day to where it's all blending into each other.

Jeffrey 1:22

Yeah, so I have a spreadsheet for this very purpose. I have been personally maintaining this spreadsheet since the resumption of missile testing in 2019. Should I run you through what we've experienced so far? Yeah, let's go for it. Okay, so on the 5th of January, North Korea tested a, well, we're just calling it MARV, a liquid propellant booster with a maneuvering reentry vehicle.

They tested the same MARV on January 10, and Kim Jong-un was in attendance for that. So that's two.

Aaron 2:02

We were smoking again, too. Yeah.

Jeffrey 2:04

Yeah, he's back to smoking. He was in his tricked out Mercedes Sprinter, which has been upgraded since the last time we saw it. Maybe it's a new one with a new interior. I mean, it's, well, North Korea could use some West Coast customs. That's all I'll say. And then on the 14th of January, they tested a pair of KN23s off a rail car.

Aaron 2:28

It was fun.

Jeffrey 2:29

It's always – that's just always spectacular. And then on the 17th, it was the Chunky Boy. It was the Chunky Boy. That's right. Chunky Boy. Yeah, a pair of KN-24s from Sunan. So – from the airport. So that's what we've got. A bunch of missile tests. Really, only Marv is new. We've obviously seen the—we saw the Railborne KN-23 last year and did a whole bunch of crazy train stuff with that.

And Chunky Boy is an old and trusted friend. But we're not really here to talk about the missile tests so much as—

Aaron 3:14

The Helter-Skelter in place, that's what I'm calling it. That's a twisted metaphor, but you know what I'm talking about.

Jeffrey 3:22

Yeah, so Aaron, you probably have the story in front of you, but it has been reported that after the first test, Of the maneuvering reentry vehicle, which, you know, is a short range system that went, you know, the North Koreans said, I think, 700 kilometers and the South Koreans said less than that, you know, more like 460 kilometers.

Despite that, everybody in Fort Greeley was ordered to take shelter.

Aaron 3:54

Yeah, I mean, I know that we were all sort of privately ruminating about two things. I mean, one was the grounding of all air traffic, I believe, on the West Coast by the FAA. And then there was the second story that came out, and I'm reading it on the alaskapublic.org, which I think is the Alaska Public Media, which is that Fort Greeley Missile Defense Base evacuated last week, but leaders won't say why.

This one was different because rather than sort of coming out with just a normal statement, the sort of like the statement that's since become routine, U.S. condemns, reviews sanctions, all options on the table, there was a lot of sort of fittering about in terms of whether or not where this latest test of Marv was going to land.

Jeffrey 4:47

Yeah, so I think this is worth at least this short episode because the ground stop and the decision to have people take shelter at Fort Greeley, I think, illustrate that warning systems are imperfect. Yeah. And that's not just false alarms or missing things, but the information that they are able to acquire in a very brief period of time is incomplete.

And I think one of the things that folks don't understand, and I noticed this about the students in my class, is there's almost an expectation that things are like a video game. And that there is this very high level of information that's available. And in fact, that is like not it at all. And so I showed them some of the declassified pictures from Sibbers as well as what the control screens at Greeley look like.

And let me tell you, the younglings were not impressed.

Aaron 5:50

No. And I think that as we were talking about it amongst ourselves, you know, what could possibly have led to these two things? It was we quickly came to, you know, I guess the challenges involved in the initial data that would be coming in. And then perhaps either an overly cautious administrator or people or real genuine concerns about the uncertainty about where this missile was going.

Jeffrey 6:16

Yeah, and I think the first thing we should probably say is the ground stop was extremely unusual. The Fort Greeley shelter in place wasn't – or take shelter. That's not that unusual. We have had periodic reports that other North Korean missile tests triggered that kind of reaction. Right. Particularly in July 2019, there were at least two reports.

Yeah. You know, it makes sense at one level that if there's something ambiguous and you don't know if it might be part of an attack on the missile defense system in Greeley, then people should take shelter. That's very reasonable. But the fact that these are routine tells you a lot about how much ambiguity there is at the beginning of a launch process.

Aaron 7:05

Right. And I think we should also mention that I think some of the initial reporting suggested that the interceptors that would be fired would be from Vandenberg. They wouldn't have even been from Alaska.

Jeffrey 7:14

Yeah. I mean, so when I kind of went through this, there are two things that kind of pop out at me. One is just the trajectory. You know, the trajectory of the system was northwest out of North Korea. But because the Earth is a sphere, if you're coming northwest out of Korea, you're actually headed toward Hawaii. Rather than Alaska, right?

Aaron 7:42

It's crazy to think about, yeah.

Jeffrey 7:44

Earth is a sphere. It's weird. So, yeah, I would think that if you saw something on a trajectory toward Alaska – I mean, sorry, rather, if you saw something on a trajectory toward Hawaii, then Vandenberg would be the place to go. To do that, although I suppose what that indicates is if you think that a missile attack is underway, you perhaps have to assume that there is an attack on the missile defense sites also underway that you haven't seen.

Right. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but that's true. So one thing was the trajectory, but the second thing that struck me was this had to be Sibbers that saw it.

Aaron 8:32

You should tell the listeners who maybe don't know as much as we do what Sibbers actually is.

Jeffrey 8:37

Sibbers is the space-based infrared system, which takes infrared imagery of launches. And so it's going to be the infrared signature that's going to tell you what's burning, what kind of engine you're looking at. And obviously, it's classified how good or bad that is. Although my... My anecdotal awareness is that it's apparently really excellent. But there's a fundamental ambiguity here that no matter how good Sibbers is, you know, we think that the booster for the maneuvering reentry vehicle is Is the same engine that's in the Hwasong-12 IRBM and the Hwasong-14 ICBM.

Aaron 9:27

Right, exactly.

Jeffrey 9:28

It's the same engine. There's less propellant, so it won't burn quite as long. But if Sibbers sees it and you don't know when it burns out yet because you're trying to be fast, that's an ICBM engine. And so if you, you know, we don't really know a ton about these systems because they're pretty careful with the details, but I would imagine...

That just my experience with dealing with stuff like this is if you have an unidentifiable ICBM engine on a trajectory toward Hawaii. And, you know, yeah, the thing was on a on a depressed trajectory, but you fire ICBMs on fairly low trajectories. Right. I imagine it probably really did look like an ICBM fired at Hawaii, at least for a few seconds.

Aaron 10:18

Right, and I think what we also need to point out is we know now, with the benefit of hindsight, because the North Koreans told us that this was Marv, but in the moment, you don't know what it is, right? That's right. And so... And we've talked a lot on this show, you know, Marv can dogleg, right? And so it's difficult to calculate or at least to understand immediately where it's headed, where an ICBM trajectory is more traditional.

And so you can get a decent sense of where it's going. But in those initial couple of seconds, they both look the same, assuming it's the same booster.

Jeffrey 10:56

Yeah, and I mean, I think it is the same booster, you know? Yeah. I mean, it's visually the same engine. It looks like it's pretty similar diameter. Maybe it was throttled a little bit, so maybe Sippers could tell, you know? But I just think that that's going to be pretty ambiguous. And the reason that that really strikes me as being worrisome, right, is that we spend all this time talking about, you know, like, well, what...

How would a crisis get out of control, right? But you could imagine a situation in a crisis where, say, the U.S. is doing a military exercise and the North Koreans are really worked up and we perhaps are worried that things are going to get out of control. If they test this system, you know, we have some evidence that it can be confused as an ICBM.

Aaron 11:56

Right.

Jeffrey 11:57

Even though it can't go anywhere near the United States. And like, you know, that's not great if you detect an ICBM launch in the middle of a crisis. Even if a few seconds later, a few minutes later, you're told it's no big deal. In a situation where... A president is under time pressure and is anxious and honestly, maybe looking for confirmation of certain biases or even in the case where you have a president who's just dead stupid.

Right. Right. That kind of ambiguity is really, really alarming. And I don't think people really imagine that that's possible. You know, I think that they sort of think that like, well, you could never confuse a short or a medium range missile for an ICBM. But like radars are ambiguous. You know, infrared systems in space are ambiguous. They give you some data and you can infer things from them, but they're not, you know, false alarms happen.

Aaron 13:05

Yeah, I actually think there's one point also to tease out there is, you know, many people might not know that MARV is actually for medium range targets. Oh, right.

Jeffrey 13:19

Yeah. So this thing was, you know, couldn't reach Japan or at least couldn't reach Tokyo. Wasn't going to go anywhere near the continental United States or Alaska or Hawaii. It was super short range system. And so... This idea that there is an ambiguity between regional systems and ICBMs is a thought that we haven't spent a lot of time talking about.

Even in the Cold War, when we imagined that the Soviets were deploying all these intermediate range nuclear forces and we were responding, there was this really comfortable idea that, well, they have this advantage because they could use intermediate range nuclear forces from The Soviet Union, and so we need to have systems in Europe, because you know, they're going to know we're not going to want to strike the Soviet Union for fear it's going to escalate. And so we had this kind of idea that you could sort of contain the theater, because people would be able to tell these systems apart, right?

But I mean, I think what we just learned in North Korea is like, well, maybe you can't always tell those systems apart, particularly if they're using the same engines and, you know, some of your systems are less than perfect. And that's, again, I think that's terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying that a Regional range missile test could even for a moment be confused with an ICBM.

Because in a normal peacetime situation, that's going to be fine. That's not going to be a big deal. In a crisis, that is a potentially fatal misunderstanding.

Aaron 15:04

Yeah, I mean, the other things it brings to my mind is both confirmation bias about the necessity of launch, as the USS Vincennes is one, and two is that ambiguity about longer range, sorry, about being able to tell apart systems is the, I guess, now dead but never quite dead idea for prompt global strike, which was always it would be fired on a depressed trajectory and therefore you would instantly be able to tell that it's conventional and not nuclear.

Jeffrey 15:35

Well, I mean, I will give you my kind of nightmare scenario. One of the things that Defense Department officials do not like talking about is the fact that they have a salvo firing doctrine for the missile defense system in Alaska.

Aaron 15:51

Right.

Jeffrey 15:52

And so they're going to fire four interceptors at every incoming missile. And even if one of them successfully destroys the incoming missile, the other three are going to continue on their trajectories because they don't self-destruct. We've talked about this. Because they don't have explosives on them because they're kinetic kill. And those things are going to fly right into Russia.

Right. And so Russian radars are going to light up. And what people always say from DoD, which is just – I mean it's – It's transparent. And I have to say, I know, I guess I'm not really supposed to talk about it. But I was in a meeting where senior officials repeated the transparent horse. And it's just so unconvincing when they say it.

You know, their view is like, well, the Russians will be able to correctly calculate the trajectories.

Aaron 16:48

Right.

Jeffrey 16:49

And they'll understand the context for the launch. And that's – they say that whether you're talking about missile defense interceptors flying into Russia or whether you're talking about overflight of Russia if the US was conducting an ICBM attack on China or North Korea, which I think would just be madness. But they're like totally confident. Like, well, we would – You know, we would talk to the Russians and they would know and it would be fine.

Which, you know, like one, not – that does not sound like the Vladimir Putin I have come to know and loathe. Right? Certainly not this week, right? Calm, rational understanding of a crisis. Two – We just saw how hard it is to actually calculate trajectories for us and for them, presumably for them, right? And then three, the assumption for a North Korean situation is always that the Russians would see the North Korean launch, so therefore they would know that our launch was a response.

But one, I was always worried the Russians might miss a North Korean launch. But the other possibility is we're the ones who do the false alarm.

Aaron 18:09

Right.

Jeffrey 18:11

And so there is no launch for the Russians to see, to understand, to make sense of it. So I just find it really interesting that we live in this scenario where we have constructed these very large alert missile forces. And they are premised on the idea that radars and space-based infrared systems work extremely well and provide very good awareness of what's going on.

And then like every real world experience we seem to have is like they work pretty well. But like they're definitely not perfect.

Aaron 18:52

It makes you think – and maybe we'll wrap up here and pivot to the end, which is the incongruity between the South Korean statement about range and the North Korean statement about range and adding even further more ambiguity and uncertainty to these types of situations.

Jeffrey 19:06

Yeah. I mean – One thing I would observe is that for at least one of the short-range – not the MARV, but for the other ones, the Japanese missed one of the launches. That's right. The South Koreans reported two. The Japanese only reported one. And the Japanese reported the second one, which is strong evidence that they did not see the first one.

Right. I am really – Coming around to the idea that the reasons that the South Koreans and the Japanese are initially saying it would go 500 kilometers on a normal trajectory and then the North Koreans turn around and say, well, it went this further direction or this further distance is because the pull-up maneuvers are happening out of view of the radars.

Aaron 19:53

That's the working assumption, right?

Jeffrey 19:55

You know, it's both they're pretty low to begin with. So, you know, like the, for example, THAAD, which is, you know, a, a nicer system and, and maybe a little, little different in some sense, you know, it has like a 40 kilometer engagement floor. And so that radar really struggles to see below that.

Aaron 20:16

Yeah.

Jeffrey 20:16

And these missiles are, you know, some of them are not, you know, they're, they're just like right in that 40, 50 kilometer range. So when they come down to do that pull up maneuver, I think that pull up maneuver is happening Under the view of the radars in Japan and South Korea, and they're just not seeing it.

And so, like, the thing I think you would use MARV for, which I made, like, a little chart, is, you know, you fire it out of North Korea, like, out over the East Sea slash Sea of Japan. Don't at me. And it's sort of flying low and kind of away from the THAAD system. And then it does its pull-up maneuver and turns back onto target on Busan, and it's doing that behind where the THAAD system can see.

Aaron 21:01

Right.

Jeffrey 21:02

So I think you can nuke Busan with Marv, and I'm not sure THAAD's ever going to see it. I mean, it might see a little bit of it, but it's never going to have a shot at it.

Aaron 21:14

Unless you deploy more THAAD and something else.

Jeffrey 21:17

Well, and honestly, I mean, even if you deploy more THAAD, you're really going to struggle because... It's that system's already flying very low relative to what its typical engagement is. So, you know, maybe you need some new fancy pants, Korean lower tier missile defense system. Maybe we could go into business as defense contractors, Aaron.

Aaron 21:42

As we always say, we take offers. Marv Busters. We take offers to sponsor the show. So just email us.

Jeffrey 21:50

Marv Busters. For a cool $4 billion, we'll make sure that your radar sees that nuclear weapon all the way into target. We never have claimed to be above selling out.

Aaron 22:04

For the right price. We would like to move to our island vacations as soon as possible. So send those inquiries over to Jeffrey at MarvBusters.com.

Jeffrey 22:18

It's like we submit like a 400-page report and just every page just says, you're f***ed, you're f***ed, you're f***ed, you're f***ed. Yeah, we can do that.

Aaron 22:27

Yeah. After spending a week – you can do that if you're the caretaker at some sort of Vermont chalet for the winter. Yeah. All by yourself up there wandering the hallways? Okay. as always, the show goes off the rails towards the end. well, on that happy note, is there anything we want to add before we do the sign-off here? No, no, we talked about it. so with that thank you everybody for listening. thank you to the Alaska, what is it?

The alaskapublic.org for your news piece, which inspired this podcast. And thank you everybody for listening. If you'd like to get more engaged, head on over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast, where you can join the conversation for $3. If you're a student $5, if you're not, when you join this elite club, you too can be in the Washington post and the economist and all sorts of fun things and get engaged in this community.

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