Test Three Missiles…

Scott LaFoy 0:02

Happy March 18th, Revolution Day.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:08

You are listening to the Arms Control Womp 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.

Scott 0:20

And I'm Scott LaFoy, Director for Nuclear and Technology Security Programs at Exeger Government Solutions. Good to see you, Jeffrey. It's been a bit.

Jeffrey 0:30

It has been a bit. North Korea has been busy. And is there a man on earth who gets more excited about a busy Kim Jong-un than you?

Scott 0:40

I can see the Zoom feed. It's you. It's clearly you.

Jeffrey 0:44

We've had to go back on our promise. For King Jong-un, he's like the guy who shows up at the all-you-can-eat buffet, and then we have to change the rule. It's no longer test a missile, get a pod. It's test three missiles, get one pod for you, man.

Scott 1:03

It's just going to run us into the ground. Otherwise, we just don't have time to cover them all.

Jeffrey 1:08

So yeah, we're obviously going to discuss North Korea's three missile launches that you and I both believe are part of the Hwasong-17 developmental series.

Scott 1:19

That is exactly correct. We think that very much like the Hwasong-12 to 14 and the 14 to 15, there were some incremental tests that were occurring here. And unlike those tests, these ones did not end particularly well.

Jeffrey 1:34

Well, apparently if you were in Pyongyang, you got a hell of a firework show.

Scott 1:38

It would have been a very, very dramatic view. Someone pointed out on Twitter that it is wild that there was very likely an ICBM that exploded under 20 kilometers in clear view of a capital city and that there is no footage online of it. Nothing has leaked.

Jeffrey 1:55

Well, there is no footage online, but you know that NK News has a picture.

Scott 2:01

I have heard. I have not seen, but I have heard.

Jeffrey 2:05

I have not seen the picture either, but the picture apparently exists. And I'm hoping someday we will all see it. But I also understand that if you have a source in Pyongyang taking pictures of sensitive defense things, no one wants this person to die.

Scott 2:21

Still want to see the picture, though.

Jeffrey 2:22

Yep. So I don't know, maybe we should just jump in. And so for listeners, just to catch you up, there was this really strange series of events. So in late February, I think on the 27th, North Korea tested a missile with a really weird trajectory. It had a 600 kilometer apogee, which is pretty high, but it only went about 300 kilometers downrange.

And so this made no sense to any of us. Because if that were just a regular missile test, you'd put it in the ocean and, like, who cares? You could test that thing to full range. And then the North Koreans came out and said, oh, well, we're developing a camera which we're going to use on a military reconnaissance satellite.

And that's why it was this bizarre-ass trajectory out of their main international airport in Pyongyang. And then they did it again. So there were these two enigmatic tests with bizarre trajectories, a bizarre launch location, and fundamentally a bizarre purpose, because why you gotta test a camera system on a ballistic missile?

Scott 3:31

Yeah, why not use a sounding rocket, something smaller, there's any number of things. And, suspiciously, in hindsight, the second test went higher and a little farther.

Jeffrey 3:41

And so what the North Koreans were saying was that this was to test all these components for the camera system that they're going to put on a military reconnaissance satellite, which, by the way, I believe they will do. You know, I'm about to talk about the other things they were up to, but I should say, like, they are also going to do that thing.

But I think the word that should have jumped out at us at the time but didn't was attitude control system. They said in both tests that they had tested an attitude control system, which is definitely good for pointing a camera, but also good for pointing warheads.

Scott 4:16

Mm-hmm. And so there was immediate skepticism, and the United States government released a statement indicating that perhaps these were ballistic missile tests. So on March 10th, the Pentagon released a statement calling these two tests, which the DPRK did refer to as satellite subsystem tests, as, quote, Involved a new intercontinental ballistic missile system that the dprk is developing which was originally unveiled during the korean workers party parade on october 10 2020 which we know exactly there was only one thing that fits that description and so tell me you tested a hwasong 17 without saying you tested a hwasong 17.

Jeffrey 5:04

I mean, I could only be happier if they had called it Chungus Humongous in the press release.

Scott 5:10

Perhaps John Kirby's not a listener.

Jeffrey 5:13

Maybe not.

Scott 5:13

We'll try and change that.

Jeffrey 5:16

We also... There were reporters at this event. And so the statement that's been released does not exactly match a lot of the reporter quotes. And so my understanding is at the actual briefing, Kirby went even further and, well, the senior official, who we all presume now is Kirby, went even further and identified it not just as the system in the parade, but also the system that was at the defense exposition.

So it's really clear that they were saying that the first two tests were tests of elements of the ICBM system. So they weren't tests of the ICBM to the full range, obviously. I'm not even convinced that they were tests of the booster, although maybe the second stage might have been involved. But what really got my attention when Kirby said elements, which he said in the briefing but not in the statement, Is I think the element had to be the attitude control system.

So it was a test of the bus for a multiple warhead ICBM.

Scott 6:19

Indeed. And there would be a lot of similarities with the things you are testing between those.

Jeffrey 6:25

By the way, I have to give Ankit Panda some credit here. The day before the John Kirby statement came out, Indo Paycom released this article Gnostic statement about how they were increasing ISR collection because of these two tests. And Ankit said, you know, this statement is really weird. Like Indo-PACOM doesn't talk about normal missile launches this way.

I think that this is something... Bigger and maybe related to the Hwasong-17. And so his ability to interpret Gnostic statements, is that the right word? From defense officials, I think is pretty impressive. So he called the Merv thing first.

Scott 7:14

So they do these two tests. And so this race is flags for us, especially it's, it's not, you know, when we were trying to figure it out, it's not surprising for the U S to call it a ballistic missile. There was still, I'd say a couple questions about if it was a Jerry rigged ballistic missile. Pretty clear after the statement, it was Hwasong-17 and then they tried to pull out the actual fireworks, which was this most recent test, which was what I time is, I, I don't know days anymore March, a couple days ago. Oh man, you're gonna make me look this up.

Jeffrey 7:52

I think it was the 16th of March. I think it was the 16th of March.

Scott 7:55

Good God, that's two days ago. Wow, it's been a long week. So two days ago, they tested a third one. We saw Cobra Ball went up.

Jeffrey 8:06

Aircraft trackers on Twitter noted that there was an unusual... As the Indo-PACOM statement suggested would be happening.

Scott 8:12

Yep, increased amount of ballistic missile tracking.

Jeffrey 8:15

I mean, it's one thing when weirdos like us are like watching the Cobra Ball on the flight tracker. It's another thing when Indo Paycom is like, watch the Cobra Ball on the flight tracker.

Scott 8:24

Yup. We got just a ton of pointers that something was up and it came out that it appeared that there was an attempted test. And now we believe that, based on all indications, the test failed. Several reporters have indicated that it failed just under 20 kilometers, which would make it a spectacular explosion. And very disturbingly, much like the two, quote unquote, satellite system tests for the potential MIRV bus, occurred at Sunan Pyongyang International Airport yesterday.

The ostensibly civilian airport just north of the capital city of Pyongyang. This would be, for listeners in my neck of the woods, sort of like if we tested a peacekeeper missile out of Dulles. It's not a great idea, it's incredibly dangerous, and it blew the f*** up.

Jeffrey 9:15

Yeah, so I mean, I found this to be a really interesting progression. So we saw the two element tests out of Sunan, and I wrote a little thing that About how North Korea seemed to be shifting testing because prior to the moratorium on flight tests, North Korea tested two Hwasong-12s out of Sunan. And then after the moratorium breaking, they tested, I think, a pair of Kan-24s out of Sunan.

And so the idea that North Korea was conducting most, not all, but like half of their missile tests, including the ICBM developmental tests, Out of their international airport. Wow, that's weird. And so... We had told some of our imaging partners to just image Sunan all the time, because as weird as it sounded, we thought that the full-range Hwasong-17 test would come out of Sunan, and it looks like that's what freaking happened.

That they did the two developmental tests, and then they launched Shungus Humongous itself, only for it to explode over Pyongyang delivering a great Juche fireworks show.

Scott 10:26

Which, much like those Hwasong-12 tests that appeared to have adverse impacts on nearby farming regions, don't test your missile over civilian areas. This is incredibly dangerous and irresponsible.

Jeffrey 10:39

It's really wild. I mean, I want to talk about the missile and what we know about it. But one other thing I want to note is, you know, in the little article I wrote, which was really just like a, I don't know, call it amusing, because I don't know if anything I said was right. Do you remember there is that new ballistic missile facility that is rail served at Sunan Airport?

And for the wildest time or the longest time, we were like, this place is wild because it doesn't look like a missile base. There's no housing. All the nearby housing, I think, is associated with the cooperative farm. Right. And the only road access is through the airport. And so it just didn't look like a missile base. But it was clearly a missile related facility because it's got a big high bay building.

And so like CSIS, like we weren't willing to stick our necks out because we were like, I mean, it looks like a missile facility, but why would you put one next to the air base? And so Joe Bermudez at CSIS did stick his neck out. I'm glad he did. And he was like, look, it looks like a missile facility.

And I was like, OK, yes, it does. I wonder if that is related to the shift in testing.

Scott 11:48

I mean, it would make sense if they're planning on keeping this up. Kim Jong-un likes creating those Pink Floyd album photo ops at the airport in the early morning. You're going to need a facility to do it because these are way too big of missiles to be just around with like the Hwasong-12. The 17 is a big missile and requires a lot of support.

And I can't imagine they're just driving that thing around willy-nilly.

Jeffrey 12:10

But just the idea that you would build a dedicated facility at your major international airport to conduct missile testing. We don't have any precedent for this. This is not what China or India or Pakistan did. No one was like, oh, a major international airport. That's a good place to put your missile testing site. Normally they're next to water.

I mean, I guess the answer is it's a missile demonstration site.

Scott 12:41

Missile demonstration? That sounds like something deliberately worded to avoid sanctions.

Jeffrey 12:45

No, I just mean that, like, a lot of test sites, it's like, wow, we're going to launch a lot of stuff and it's going to blow up. And, like, their requirements are slightly different. Like, we're going to launch a lot of stuff and Kim is going to watch it. So it's as much about the demonstration effect as the testing.

So I think that's just absolutely bonkers.

Scott 13:07

I think that's insane to me. And do you want to talk next about...

Jeffrey 13:12

So we can either talk. We can either talk about... We can talk about the bad OSINT. Or we can talk about the performance of the missile. We will talk about them both. But which would you like to do first, Scott?

Scott 13:26

Let's have this podcast be a shit Oreo. So we've got the good OSINT. Then we're going to do the bad OSINT. Then we're going to go back to the good OSINT of your students at the end.

Jeffrey 13:34

Okay. Yeah, so... After the test, a bunch of vehicles showed up, like 50 vehicles. And we saw that. And like everybody else, we were like, whoa, what's going on there? Is that related to the test? And we got pictures on two consecutive days. And in the end, we decided not to publish because we concluded that the 50 vehicles that showed up.

Were associated with agricultural work at the facility because two reasons. One is that Planet got a three meter image, and nobody likes to use the three meter images because they're hard to interpret, but that's bad oscent. The three meter image showed that the 50 vehicles were not there in the morning when the launch happened. The vehicles arrived afterwards, and so it's One of the big arguments that I had made when I said we should consider the possibility was related to the launch.

I was like, they're not going to do a test with 50 vehicles out there.

Scott 14:34

Right.

Jeffrey 14:34

Unless those vehicles are essential for the launch. And so we were like, okay, well, let's go look at the three meter and see what the three meter says, even though it's harder to interpret. And it's like, oh, they're not there. The vehicles weren't there for the launch. And then Dave Schmerler, you know, our Schmerler who art in DC at the office, Dave went back and dug up a lot of past photos showing the same number and types of vehicles at agricultural work in the past.

Scott 15:03

Yeah.

Jeffrey 15:05

And so we were like, nope, it's farming. We're not going to publish. And sure enough, some people published. And I have to say, Collins Werko, who's White, a good analyst, did the same thing and then published it on NK News. So I was like, come on, Dave, we got to write something. And Dave was like, nah, it's OK. And then I think Werko both, A, proved we should have written something because it's really good.

But B, made it so I don't have to write anything because it's really good.

Scott 15:29

It was excellent. Indeed, and it's something worth noting for listeners who don't look at a lot of missile sites that, much like hosting a missile launch out of an international airport, Hosting agricultural facilities at an airport and at a missile site may seem stupid, but is actually something that happens in both North Korea and China. We've seen within the strategic rocket forces in the DPRK and within the people's liberation army rocket force, the PLARF in China, that cooperative farming onsite agriculture is a thing.

It used to be part of ideological education. I actually don't know if it's part of ideological education anymore. And so co-location of agro facilities and like exploitation of land frequently occurs in the least appropriate industrial and military places you can imagine in these signatures.

Jeffrey 16:21

Yeah, and I, you know, it's bizarre, but you can flat out see it. One of the places I noticed was when we flipped on the near-infrared band. You could absolutely see that the, you know, part of the field was like a field field, and part of the field was a funny color. So I don't know if they had like a plastic tarp over it that was just really hard to see optically, or if they had, you know, tilled the soil or whatever, but...

In between the runways in that big field in the middle, like they seem to have an active agricultural, like, I don't, I don't know, man. The UDMH makes the beets taste better, man. Yeah. But I mean, and I don't want to, like, I don't know. I understand how it happened. I knew because when we saw the imagery, we were like, oh, maybe this is related to the test.

So I understand the compulsion. And then once we figured out it was agriculture, like I knew someone would have to take the bait and still publish it anyway. That like all those people who have access to those images, somebody was going to look at it and be wrong on the internet.

Scott 17:22

Well, that's why we have the rest of the internet and folks like Colin to yell at them.

Jeffrey 17:27

Well, let me say it. Can I make a pedagogical point? Sure. A lot of my open source class right now is about the method of interpreting satellite imagery. And so we really spend a lot of time saying... That most people still do it wrong, which is that they go and they look for the thing that they want to see.

Scott 17:53

Right.

Jeffrey 17:54

And that opens you up to confirmation bias. And what the task really is, is looking is trying to understand what is normal in a place and looking for deviations from that.

Scott 18:04

Right.

Jeffrey 18:04

And you must know what normal looks like. And so what Dave did so well, which makes Dave a superior photo interpreter to 99% of the people out there, including myself, Dave is really good. Is Dave goes through all the images forever, right? So he doesn't just look at the image plus a comparison image, he will look at every single image of that place for as many years as possible, so he knows what normal is like. And when he does that, he's like, no dude, 50 vehicles show up all the time. It's called agriculture.

And so for him, like he doesn't exoticize, you know, these these countries. He knows what normal agricultural and other life patterns look like. And I would say nine out of 10 great Dave moments are him shooting down some bad bit of OSINT because he's put in the work. So you have to put in the work. And, you know, I, you know, hats off to Collins Werko, who also put in the work.

Scott 19:05

Absolutely. And speaking of putting in the work, I think it's now time to talk about mathematical models that your class has been working on. Because after the bad OSINT, we're going to talk about the good OSINT, which is that you were telling me off pod that you and your class had been working on models of the Hwasong-17 and that exploding below the 20 kilometer line lines up with your numbers.

Jeffrey 19:33

Yeah, and in good OSINT tradition, I'll say everything I'm going to talk about now is kind of pre-review, because we're going to do this now for realsies here at CNS, and we'll probably wait for North Korea to launch a Hwasong-17 and for it to work before we release our full Hwasong-17 model. But we've been getting ready. And part of getting ready is this year in my open source class, I did a week and a half, a two and a half week module.

So the first day I taught them how to measure things and then sent them away for a few days to actually measure the Hwasong-17. And then we came back and did it all together.

Scott 20:20

Mm hmm.

Jeffrey 20:22

And so we got about 2.4 meters in diameter, worked out all the sizes of the tanks and the amount of propellant that must be in the tanks, and checked the volumetric ratio of the tanks against NTO and UDMH, and did all the classic measuring things you would do. Then I did another lecture on tracking rockets, like the acceleration to work out the thrust of the engine.

Did a whole class on that. Their homework was to go away and to do a March 18th revolution engine, which is probably in the Hwasong-17. And we all came back and we got, you know, 40 tons in change of thrust. Which also reminds me, happy March 18th revolution day. Happy March 18th revolution day. So for listeners, that's the new engine that enabled all the new North Korean missiles we saw in 2017, the Hwasong-12, 14, and 15.

The Hwasong-17 almost certainly has four combustion chambers of this type. And so if one of them is 40 tons, this thing is going to be like 160 tons of thrust. So they worked out all those numbers. And then we came back on the last day of this kind of five day over two and a half week project.

And then we integrated all those numbers into a model. And, you know, you get three kind of 500 kilogram warheads to about 10,000, 11,000 kilometers range, which is sort of what you'd expect for a missile like this.

Scott 21:46

Good.

Jeffrey 21:47

And then the neatest thing was we looked at when max Q, the maximum aerodynamic forces on the missile body were, and it turns out that they occur just before 20 kilometers in altitude.

Scott 22:01

So at least consistent with the journalist's reporting, where it exploded would be what your model said was roughly when it would have the highest aerodynamic forces and the roughest time moving through the atmosphere.

Jeffrey 22:16

Right. And so, you know, what I said to the students was, and again, like, we'll model this more times.

Scott 22:22

Of course.

Jeffrey 22:23

You know, and like, maybe it'll be off a little bit. But to a first approximation, the back of the envelope calculation suggests, yes, the missile failed before the engine burned out, which makes engine trouble a real possibility. But then the other possibility is it was just simply structural. And, you know, one thing we've found is that really to get the ranges we expect the Hwasong-17 to have, it's got to have a pretty light structure relative to the amount of propellant.

You know, it's not something you could over-engineer. Like Chungus Humongus has to actually have delicate bones.

Scott 22:57

Right.

Jeffrey 22:58

So, you know, just is what it is. So we... You know, obviously, we can't say that the failure was Max Q or that the failure was related to the engine. But I do think it is cool that using basic information from the parade and the defense expo, plus an understanding of the performance of the engine, that we can sort of start to generate hypotheses about what might have gone wrong.

And if we get like a little hint. Whether it's a statement from a North Korean official or a U.S. intelligence person or some other little bit of data, I think we really are in a position to say something kind of interesting about where they are in this process.

Scott 23:37

And predicted, you now have the stuff to do predictive metrics. You can guess where it's going. Yeah. Incredible.

Jeffrey 23:44

So, I don't know. I mean, maybe the students just did a bad job or I effed it up as the teacher, but... You know, it was really interesting. I mean, we crowdsourced it in the class and I let them make decisions. You know, I would explain to them kind of rules of thumb and I let them pick.

And their model ended up being very close to our internal model. And, you know, part of that's because I'm the connective tissue in terms of giving them the rules of thumbs. But I would let them vote. I would say like, you know, kind of an aggressive number would be like seven or eight percent of – The structural mass of the total mass of the first stage is structure.

And, you know, conservative number would be like 15%. And, you know, like, here's what some different, you know, international missiles were. And they were like, well, let's go with, you know, let's go with nine. And it's like, oh, nine's a good number. You know, it was really, it was a really, it was a cool class. But I was really, I was really amazed at how, how closely that modeling process really kind of

Scott 24:47

Resemble the failure mode that we saw. It could just be a coincidence. Well, and to just remind listeners of what you said on the parameters for those that model that, is specifically for a Merved, a three warhead Merved model, which would be consistent with what Kim Jong-un expressed desire for before parading the, the Chungus Humongous.

Jeffrey 25:10

Well, I mean, it makes sense with the two weird tests out of Sunan, right? Why would you test an element of a system like this rather than just going ahead and flight testing it? And maybe the answer is you're working out your bus.

Scott 25:22

Yeah, buses are hard.

Jeffrey 25:24

Buses are hard.

Scott 25:25

But we know the North Koreans have a lot of trouble with satellites. They don't have a lot of experience with orbital operations. They don't have ground station access that we're aware of. Like they're going to have a hell of a time figuring out how to get a bus running. But I mean, that's still what 1970s, 1980s technology.

It's something that it's, The data is there. You can find it. It's just about your experience now.

Jeffrey 25:49

I think so. Well, that's probably the last thing we should talk about, which is even though the test came out of Sunan, one of the things that the Defense Department said was that they may try to disguise the test of an ICBM as a space launcher. And I don't know if they're going to do that or not.

I'm actually slightly skeptical that they're going to do that. But Kim did go to SOHE, and he did say they're putting a satellite in space. And so whether they use a traditional space launcher or something new, they are gonna put something in space in addition to testing at ICBM.

Scott 26:22

I'm really curious if we see a MIRV bus with one object on it, and that one object is a modest- That's called a smart dispenser.

Jeffrey 26:32

Do you remember the smart dispenser in China in the 1990s? I do not. Oh, my God. China developed a satellite dispenser to put three satellites in orbit, which would have made a terrible bus. Because it was heavy and it was not a great boss. But this was back in the days when we still pretended that teaching Chinese people physics was the end of the world.

And so people got really freaked out about this smart dispenser China had built. Like, oh my god, it's a MIRV! They're going to build MIRVs! Which, yeah, they were going to build MIRVs, but that's... And people really freaked out about it. There was an intelligence report about how you would convert the smart dispenser into a MIRV bus that Bill Gertz got and leaked.

And I actually went to a museum in China, you know, the big aerospace museum run by the aerospace industry. And it was there. I got.

Scott 27:32

Oh, got to touch the chonker. But so there's, there's, I actually don't know if the lesson for that is that the precedent is that a dispenser can be a MERV bus. I guess, I mean, if you will it hard enough.

Jeffrey 27:49

It was one of the reasons that I wasn't worried about the U.S. transfer to China because they could make a MIRV bus and they could make their own satellite dispenser. But what was happening is we were helping them optimize it for the one task. And I didn't think of it as a profound proliferation risk because, you know, if they were interested, they could optimize that basic technology in the way that they want.

Yeah.

Scott 28:14

And now that's what we're potentially seeing with the North Koreans. I think so.

Jeffrey 28:19

I think they're going to do both.

Scott 28:20

Yeah.

Jeffrey 28:20

They're going to have a smart dispenser and a MIRV bus.

Scott 28:25

I can't not see. Can't not see. I definitely expect at some point a Hwasong-17 painted white launched out of Sohae with a peaceful satellite on a MIRV bus, basically. Yeah.

Jeffrey 28:39

I wish for this as an act of trolling. I, it would be the ultimate act of North Korean trolling, and it would be very, very funny. I, I, I think they're gonna let us down and just fire another Kwang Myung Song. But god, you're right, it would be absolutely hilarious to see them roll out Chungus Humongous and put a dumb ass fairing instead of a shroud. I, that's kind of what I think they're pointing to, because they, they, we know it's so hey got what renovations in like 2019 to hold a bigger missile.

Scott 29:08

And we know that the glorious March 18th revolutionary engine is a, you know, like the Hwasong-12, Hwasong-14, it's a UDMH engine. The Eunha and whatnot used those scud-derived engines. Like, I don't think they, I can't imagine that they are going to stick with the fail sun space launcher if they can get the 17 working. And then now they have their very literal dual-use Launcher but like yeah so no plausible deniability like with the the typo dong i remember there was just the years of like the u.s government asserting that it's an icbm other folks saying this is if if this was an icbm it's really inefficient really and then north korea turning around and going actually this one we've already paraded as an icbm we are actually going to use this as a space launcher now i don't think they'll do it but god it would be funny

I do expect whatever space launcher they use will look like a Hwasong-17 no matter what.

Jeffrey 30:09

Oh, you think they're going to switch the engine?

Scott 30:11

I think they're going to switch the engine because the Scuds suck. There's only so much efficiency you can squeeze out of them.

Jeffrey 30:16

They do suck.

Scott 30:17

Yeah. I think the only reason that they would still use them is if they...

Jeffrey 30:22

Got in some good optimization or have one laying around that they fixed up, but I think it's been a disappointing launcher, and I'm hoping they're not going to do the Iranian thing and just really double down on a bad launcher and just keep doing it but well, I will say that when they tested the March 18th Revolution engine for the first time Before they actually admitted it was the March 18th Revolution engine, they said it was for a rocket launcher that would put a satellite in geo.

Scott 30:51

Yep. That's sort of the trend line I'm watching is that, you know, switching to UDMH, switching to those fancy pants engines and getting away from the nasty scuds.

Jeffrey 31:04

Yeah, I think that's pretty reasonable. Also, one other thing, Scott, can I get that members-only jacket that Kim Jong-un was wearing? Wasn't it incredible?

Scott 31:14

What was that hairdo, too? It was a real look in Sohei.

Jeffrey 31:17

And those sunglasses?

Scott 31:20

Yeah, it was...

Jeffrey 31:23

Those sunglasses looked like he had a cataract removed.

Scott 31:29

Right. It also looked very Top Gun, I believe is what you noted on Twitter.

Jeffrey 31:34

There was a Top Gun outfit. I can't remember now because he did Sohei and the General Satellite Control Center. So in case you were wondering whether a space launch is coming, yes. Yeah. I mean, he's like, we're going to launch a satellite. And people are like, do you think he might launch a satellite? And it's like, I am touring the place that will control the satellite.

Mom, maybe he's going to launch a satellite. I don't know that Kim Jong-un, he's so mysterious. I am now at the place where we are going to launch the satellite. I don't know. We make fun of the guy's clothes, but I don't know what the F he has to do. Maybe he has to actually dress up like an astronaut.

But yeah, at one of them, he wore the bomber jacket, and then the other, he had the members on the jacket.

Scott 32:14

It's been a special time for fashion. And he's still thin. He lost a lot of weight still. But more importantly, so what's your prediction? What's your near-term or medium-term predictions?

Jeffrey 32:24

So I'm going to go with the boring prediction. And I know that prediction makes fools of us all. I think they will do just a Hwasong-17 launch all by itself. Okay. I don't think they're going to pretend it's a space launch. I think they're going to be like... Look at the Supreme Leader's big penis. I think they will do a separate space launch.

I think it will be something that is visually distinguishable from the Hwasong-17. But I could be wrong about that. I take your point that they might just get tired with a Kwon Young-sung series. So I think there's going to be a separate space launch From a test of a liquid propellant ICBM with MIRVs, which is going to be separate from the solid propellant ICBM launch that they are also going to do sometime in the next year, 18 months, two years.

Like those are three distinct things that are coming.

Scott 33:25

Absolutely agree. We should record a podcast that's like Mad Libs where we describe the solid fuel ICBM test in detail and just leave the specifics out. Like, just record that next week and then just fill it in when it happens just to kind of really, like, dig the knife in. Like... Yeah, I think that's right. I think those are the three big things were coming.

Is there anything else on Kim Jong-un's weapons checklist? Remember he had that big old checklist he presented.

Jeffrey 33:51

You know, I feel bad. I, they had their list of top five priorities and I wasn't able to extract it from the from, from the speech itself because they all seemed like priorities to me. But then a colleague went ahead and sent me His guess, I have to be quiet about who that colleague is and the way in which it was sent.

But I have the list. Here they are. Okay, ready? So the top five goals are, my colleague has told me, continuous production of supersized nuclear warheads. So that's the thermonuclear weapons. Yep. Improving the rate of precision. In order to strike targets at a range of 15,000 kilometers.

Scott 34:49

Ambitious.

Jeffrey 34:51

Hypersonic gliding flight warheads, which we've seen already.

Scott 34:54

Yeah, f*** off. Don't like those. It's annoying.

Jeffrey 34:58

Solid-fueled engine for ICBMs.

Scott 35:01

We'll get there.

Jeffrey 35:03

And a nuclear-powered submarine. I think that's gonna be the hardest. That's still the least realistic to me. That one's so much harder, and I know on Kit reported that in his book as well, and that just seems so, so much harder than the rest of those for a country. Well, Kim has said it, it came out of his mouth, and the Daily NK also known as the Daily who knows Or the Daily Nobody Knows, I guess, if you really want to make it an acronym, reports that a bunch of people got purged for their slow progress on this impossible task.

Scott 35:39

That's going to be a real... That program office is going to have a lot of turnover then because that's not going to get better. Where the hell are they going to steal it from? That's a hard thing to build.

Jeffrey 35:49

Maybe they wait for the South Koreans to build it and they steal it from them.

Scott 35:55

I'm laughing, but I hate it. Yeah, there's some leaky folks one could look into. If only there was a major nuclear port nearby that they could potentially abscond things from. There's a lot coming on.

Jeffrey 36:10

Well, I mean, yeah, there's a lot coming on. And I know a podcast where you can hear all about it.

Scott 36:18

And I know a Slack channel where you can discuss all about it. And if you would like to join that Slack channel, and if you would like to support that podcast, you can head over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast. And for $3 a month, if you are a student, or $5 a month, if you are a regular functioning human being.

You can get access to our Slack channel and support us. Those invitations come out sort of on a rolling basis. They're not automated. I know I've gotten a lot of frustrated emails lately because I'm working long hours and not getting those every day. So just a heads up that those may take a couple days to reach you.

Jeffrey 37:00

Jeffrey? Scott, it's been the pleasure that it always is.

Scott 37:05

It has been too long, but I have a feeling I will be back very soon.

Jeffrey 37:10

Me too.