The Lake-Bed Missile

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. 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 0:22

And I am Aaron Stein, Chief Content Officer at War on the Rocks. Jeffrey, it's good to see you. It's good to see you, Aaron. I am finally back home after three weeks on the road. I'm tired. You have a very California background today. It's not like whales or the ocean, but it's like a California, California blue that I think is in your either home office or home bedroom or both.

Jeffrey 0:45

Well, I live in a very small space in California now that the family has relocated to upstate New York. So this is the home office and bedroom.

Aaron 0:53

It's an all-purpose room. I like the zen blue. It reminds me of, I don't know, a place in Spain or Morocco.

Jeffrey 1:01

It's very chill. I'm honestly really happy to be back in California. I did an interview yesterday with NHK, or maybe two days ago, and they've got me filmed. They're filming me walking all over and directing research assistants, and I'm there in my Vans, and it felt good.

Aaron 1:20

Yeah. That's California dreams. But you're also also in range. And there's been a lot of missile tests going on. I think we're all in range now. But you used to be the first in line. Now, I guess you're still first in line, but we're all in line.

Jeffrey 1:36

I think Kim Jong Un, he's not going to he's not going to do me like that.

Aaron 1:40

He's going to let you live on your life in your vans? I think so.

Jeffrey 1:44

I think, you know, maybe I'm wrong. But yeah, I mean, it's been a banner couple of weeks for U.S.-North Korea policy. We recorded an episode, which we dropped, and then the North Koreans, you know, made liars of us all by giving us tons of pictures of stuff that had already happened. And then giving us many, many more missile tests, all of which culminates in me writing an op-ed for the New York Times and showing up at the Carnegie Nuclear Policy Conference, where my desire to just admit the North Koreans have nuclear weapons seems ever so slightly to be making progress.

I don't know.

Aaron 2:31

Well, isn't admitting you have a problem the first step towards recovery? And until you're ready to do that, so maybe if you get down to step one of the 12-step process, we can push the debate forward. Stop talking about my drinking, Aaron. Well, I couldn't keep up. I'm not going to pretend to the listeners that I actually know how many North Korean nuclear tests.

I'm not going to pretend to the listeners that I know how many missile tests that they've conducted since our last pod. I think it's three dozen or approximately three dozen, close or over 30. But I know you have a spreadsheet.

Jeffrey 3:09

It's a shit ton, Aaron. Yeah.

Aaron 3:11

It's an academic term. It's every day. And if we were to actually like follow our test to miss, I'll get a pod. I think you and I wouldn't actually be sleeping.

Jeffrey 3:19

Yeah. So I think just to hit the highlights Starting in September, North Korea has done a bunch of tests to demonstrate that they have a tactical nuclear weapons capability. We've already done pods where we indicated why we think they're deploying that capability and all the evidence. But now the North Koreans have come out and said it, which is nice because it helpfully identifies for us.

Which systems are likely to be nuclear armed. And the things that they've shown us so far are my favorite is the short range ballistic missile based in a canister on the bottom of a reservoir, which is pretty, pretty rad.

Aaron 4:01

I mean, like real arms control wonk junkies will remember that we did like a basing modes podcast. I think I was living in Geneva at the time. So it's been a while on that one. And isn't that one called Orca?

Jeffrey 4:14

You know, it's funny you say that and I'm furiously Googling whether it's Orca or Hydra. I can't quite remember.

Aaron 4:21

I think that was my choice on that episode of the most wacky of U.S. basing posture proposals. And it looks like they've rolled it out. I don't know what the right word for that is. Admire the audacity or sort of like cringe at the audacity.

Jeffrey 4:37

Yeah, I think it was. I think you're right. I think it's Orca. I mean, I'm Team Hovercraft. Like, I like the ground effects machine.

Aaron 4:47

So the North Koreans haven't done that yet.

Jeffrey 4:50

But yeah. There's still time. By the way, I promise we'll get through these. But I gave a lecture for the Carnegie Nuclear Policy Conference Young Professionals track. Which was- You used to be in that. Now you've aged out? Yeah, they invited me to the young professionals track. And then I was sort of bummed when I realized I was not considered a young professional.

It's like, no, no, no, no. You get to talk to the young people. It's like, well, wait, this is the first time I've ever been invited to speak at the Carnegie conference. So I feel like I'm still a relative newbie. It's like, no, no, no, man, you're old. So I did a whole lecture on open source research and the breakout groups.

I had them try to geolocate these things.

Aaron 5:32

So yeah, they did pretty well. They did pretty well.

Jeffrey 5:36

So hey to Jamie Kwong who organized the whole thing and did like a super awesome job. So you've got the short range ballistic missile in the reservoir. Love that. A bunch of short-range ballistic missiles. But what's really interesting is this includes, as I long speculated, it includes the 600-millimeter artillery piece, the artillery rocket. So the North Koreans going hard on nuclear artillery.

Aaron 6:10

That's such a throwback to the 50s, but it is a concept that's been around for a while. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey 6:16

So, and I mean, it's a pretty, I mean, once you've got a 600 millimeter artillery piece, right, that's functionally a missile. It's a really big, I mean, it's a really big rocket, right? Yeah. Cruise missiles. And two different little innovations. The North Koreans showed us a modified version of the Hwasong-12 IRBM,

Aaron 6:44

They did, yeah, it looked funky.

Jeffrey 6:47

It looks to be substantially improved and it performed basically at the upper end of our Hwasong-12 IRBM models. So I think I'm still considering it kind of a variant of that system, but like it was better, you know? And didn't have the little Vernier steering engines on it. Looks like instead they're moving to thrust vector control, which makes sense, or at least gimbaled engines.

I guess it's a liquid rocket, so I should say gimbaled engine.

Aaron 7:21

And they fired another ICBM.

Jeffrey 7:25

And I mean, this is a weird one because it either didn't work, but the picture they released Wasn't the big Hwasong-17 with multiple warheads. It looked like some variant of the Hwasong-15. So it's either they recycled an old picture, which Collins Worko at NK News has been doing a great job of pointing out a lot of the pictures they've released from these events were recycled.

And so they didn't necessarily give us real pictures of all the stuff they did.

Aaron 7:55

Yeah, and if I'm remembering correctly, a lot of the times they're releasing the picture sort of in batches after the first test. That's right. And so we get reports. We can infer what it is based upon those reports, how far it flew, what we think it is, particularly the ICBM test. But then they came back out afterwards and they gave you the high quality, full frontal imagery that we all love in our super secret DM groups.

Jeffrey 8:21

Yeah. So the consequence of that is we tend to get this like pile of pictures and then you have to go back and you have to assign the pictures to events. And the North Koreans on the one hand are very formulaic in that they present things in order and they have a very clear story they want to tell you about what they did and when they did it, why they did it.

It's all linked to the fact that the U.S. has, you know, is conducting military exercises. So they have like a very clear propaganda line. But then when you really start to pick at the details, there are all these inconsistencies. So some of the images have been recycled from previous tests. And some of the images are heavily, heavily, heavily etched.

So we just got our license renewed on tungsten. The French software that we use to detect photo alterations. And, you know, there was a while in which the North Koreans weren't making significant alterations to the photographs. I think they wanted us to believe what we were looking at. And now they're back to just photoshopping the crap out of them.

And it's hard to tell in some cases that maybe to make them look pretty. In some cases, the images are composites of things, you know, so... I know it's a big job to sift through all this data and really try to get at the bottom of what's happening. Other than to say, boy, they really like tactical nuclear weapons and they're continuing to work on their missile program.

Aaron 9:47

Yeah, and I think one of the other big takeaways is that not all of these are tests. So maybe that's like the line or they are all tests. Let me repeat that. They are all tests, but I think they really want to signal that these are operational readiness tests of the units in the field rather than data gathering tests as the primary purpose.

Jeffrey 10:08

That's a really good point, Aaron. And I have said that to reporters a lot, and I don't think it always gets through. I do think some number of these things are still developmental tests, like the new ICBM or the new IRBM. But you are exactly right. The vast majority of these are not tests of the missile. They are tests of the missile unit.

It's a training exercise. And so a lot of the short and medium range things we're seeing, including they've released an image of, I think it was a Scud was back.

Aaron 10:41

That was last night. We're recording this on November 9th. It was last night or two nights ago. It was relatively recent.

Jeffrey 10:45

Yes, and we spent yesterday staring at the pictures. And maybe it was recycled. I don't know yet. We're trying to work through it. But there are two messages. There is that they are developing new longer range liquid propellant systems like the Hwasong-12 and the 15 and the 17. And those are still developmental tests. But they have really embraced using nuclear weapons preemptively to repel an invasion.

And those systems are deployed or at least are in the process of being deployed. So I keep reporters like, when are they gonna deploy these capabilities? Like now they're doing it. And these are tests of the units to demonstrate that they can conduct the mission of nuking the crap out of us if they think we're gonna invade.

Aaron 11:38

So this gets back to your op-ed. You said you're getting a teeny bit closer to I think an arms control wonk podcast truism, which is that they have nuclear weapons, they work. Some of them may be a little janky, but when it goes boom, the boom is bad, but it will go boom, right? It seems like the timing of this, Is meant to match the US ROK military exercises.

And so in that respect, when the political signaling that goes on with them, I think, using nuclear weapons as a deterrence, and we implicitly matching that with our own language, saying something along the lines of, we can destroy you. I think Austin, with the ROK Minister of Defense, was reaffirming US extended deterrence. Are we not implicitly recognizing that they have a nuclear weapons capability where we say, if you go first, we'll go second, and you're all going to go up and smoke?

Jeffrey 12:34

You know, I think that came through at the Carnegie Nuclear Policy Conference. And there was a big kind of kerfuffle about it because I think reporters were picking up on the implicit recognition And they were trying to force the administration out in the open. But at the nuclear policy conference, I would say two really important things happened.

One was that when Bonnie Jenkins, the undersecretary for arms control and international security was asked whether we would talk to the North Koreans about arms control, she said that we would pick up the phone. Now, later they made clear that Policy had not changed, that we were not going to formally recognize it. But I think that the attitude was, you know, we have a problem here and we want to do something about it.

It's a little bit like other meetings I've talked about on the podcast that I'm now banned from ever mentioning again. But when you get military officials talking about this issue, right, they immediately talk about it as a deterrence problem. And if you're talking about it as a deterrence problem, that is, I would argue, an implicit recognition. So I don't think that the Biden administration is going to listen to my advice in terms of overtly accepting that North Korea has this nuclear capability.

But they're not stupid. And I think that they are stupid. Aware of the fact that this is a problem. And so I think that it's both true that they're not going to, they're not going to do what I say rhetorically, but I believe that they would pick up the phone. The second thing is, as you say, if you look at the nuclear posture review, which finally got dropped during the nuclear policy conference, which is a Oh, it's such a collection of cliches and jargon.

We can do this in another podcast.

Aaron 14:32

We're not going to do it. Like we've had like four NPR podcasts. Just no. We're just going to skip it. I don't think there's anything valuable in it, but go ahead.

Jeffrey 14:40

But it clearly sends a deterrent messaging that there is no situation in which Kim Jong-un could use nuclear weapons that wouldn't result in the end of his regime, which I think is the right message to send, because I think the North Koreans have like slightly the wrong idea that They think that if they hit us really hard, it might stop the invasion.

Aaron 15:00

That's an escalate to de-escalate. I'm sorry. It was a joke. Don't do that to me.

Jeffrey 15:05

Don't do that to me. Oh, my God. I'm having a stroke. I know you do. Oh, my gosh. But, I mean, I think you're seeing that the – When we talk about arms control, people get really uncomfortable about recognizing the fact that they have nuclear weapons because that's like somehow transgressive. But the minute it's hawkish, it's like, well, okay, so let's assume we're not going to talk to them.

We're just going to be really tough. Is this a deterrence problem? Everybody's like, oh yeah, this is a deterrence problem. And it's like, okay, well, if you're not coercing them to give up their nuclear weapons, but instead you're coercing them not to use them, Then you're basically accepting my premise. And you know, like, okay, I'm the hippie who says it out loud in the New York Times, but like, you all know I'm right.

You won't admit it, but you know I'm right, which is fine as long as they invite me to nice dinners, it's okay.

Aaron 16:02

Yeah, I mean, the DC food scene has improved. So those dinners are better than they used to be. I mean, of the missile test, was there anyone that really stuck out to you as like worthy of like further explanation or just that they just keep firing them off?

Jeffrey 16:20

Well, you know, the reservoir stands out to me because, holy crap, that's wild. And actually, I think it makes a lot of sense for them. I mean, like a lot of this stuff, it's sort of slightly goofy. So we sort of laugh at it. But I don't know that it's actually, you know, profoundly that goofy in the sense that they've got big reservoirs.

They don't have like a really viable submarine program. So you get kind of a lot of the benefit in terms of making it hard to target the missiles while at the same time not having a lot of downsides. So it's weird, but it's, you know, I think it's an honest expression of their strategic predicament. And so I kind of like that one.

And I'm just not sure what the hell is going on with the ICBM.

Aaron 17:12

So that's a mystery to me. On the reservoir, I mean, I think it's Orca. It's hilarious. But you're right. It's sort of a localized, janky version of the shell game that we've talked about with China, where you can build more silos than you have missiles, and you can move them around. So you have to force the adversary to devote more of its force to counterforce.

And so you can ensure that some of it's survivable, at least in their head. And so it's Kind of crazy, but also creative in terms of resource management on their side. The ICBM, I can't wrap my head around either. It certainly was the ICBM range, but the pictures were really weird, and so I'm just not sure what it is.

Jeffrey 17:56

Yeah, we're just baffled. And there could be a bunch of things going on. I mean, one thing that might be happening is that the Hwasong-17 is in some sort of trouble. It just isn't working right. And so they're maybe going back to the 15. And by the way, we have a Hwasong-15 and we have a Hwasong-17. So what's the 16?

So one possibility is that the weird thing we're seeing is a 16. But it may be that the 17 is going to be like some other missiles we've seen in the past, which is a design dead end that doesn't work for them. We just don't know. Or it may be that they're testing components still. How they're going about this technically, it probably reflects a lot of things that we can't see into in terms of what their bottlenecks are, problems they're able to solve.

So it's one of these situations where, I mean, the general trend is super clear. Like, I get it. They want a big ICBM that's mobile and can put multiple warheads on the United States. That's a really tough sell with liquids. And so they're trying to work out those problems. And there's a reason that we, there's a reason that the Soviets didn't do this, right?

There's reasons that they, you know, went for solids for their mobiles and their big liquids are sitting in silos. And so will the North Koreans be able to defy that technical gravity and work out some compromise? Or, you know, will they ultimately be like, oh yeah, this sucks. We're going to have to make the mobiles solid. And I just, I don't know.

It's kind of fascinating.

Aaron 19:44

That's, I guess, an implicit recognition that we need more tests to understand which is always the challenge, which is we learn when they put this stuff out. But when they do this stuff, it's not exactly peaches and cream watching them exercise their nuclear forces, because we know how it ends. Yeah, I mean, at some point, I mean, at some point, our big next task is to really like drill down on the missile units in North Korea and see if we find any evidence that they have.

Jeffrey 20:12

Nuclear weapons storage on site, or if we can find what you might call area nuclear weapons storage that maybe services a few different missile bases, or whether everything sits in a central stockpile. Because that's a whole new universe of open source work that we now have to do.

Aaron 20:29

So I was going to ask you about that, but I didn't want to derail the pod and have us go on for 45 minutes. But that really does seem like the next big question, if they are exercising What's their command and control structures? Where do they store their warheads? And are they deploying with warheads on them in these exercises?

Not like we could ever know. And if so, do they go to some centralized location to pick them up, to be mated?

Jeffrey 20:54

Yeah. So the DPRK nuclear law that Kim Jong-un described seems to imply that he's pre-delegated authority to use those nuclear weapons to his frontline commanders.

Aaron 21:09

Again, that would make sense. I mean, but that would make sense, like given past precedent, because that's what other nuclear armed states do. But there's variations of then like how they deploy with warheads, if I'm remembering my nuclear deployment 101 correctly.

Jeffrey 21:25

Yeah, you know, so I don't know. By the way, small happiness. I, for the longest time, have been the ninny who keeps walking around saying, you know, there are two missions. There's deter and repel. And sometimes repel is translated as repulse. But the whole tactical nuclear weapons thing is to repel an invasion. And the nuclear law repeats that, right?

It uses repulse.

Aaron 21:52

I hope they gave you a citation.

Jeffrey 21:55

Well, I mean, it's their word I picked out, but it's just nice to see. It's nice to know that I can still read propaganda and like, Spot the essential term, because that idea of deter and repel as to admissions is really me. As best I can tell, I'm the person who noticed that and really began to push that.

And I find it's still a really hard sell. People want to talk about North Korea's nuclear weapons deterring. And they don't really ever talk about nuclear weapons repelling or repulsing because admittedly, it's a weird term, but I think it's essential. So I don't know. If you're planning on repelling an invasion, particularly, by the way, in the event that you're afraid that the South Koreans are going to kill Kim Jong-un at the beginning of a conflict, and that's what the nuclear law is really about.

The pre-delegation is precisely that problem because North Korea Every time North Korea does one of these exercises, South Korea does its own little missile launch, which by the way, the one that blew up.

Aaron 23:05

Yeah. Do we know which missile it was?

Jeffrey 23:10

It was a Hyunmoo of some flavor. So I'm guessing not one of the big fancy ones. But it blew up. So yeah, listeners, the South Koreans counter-programmed North Korean missile tests, sometimes with their own missile exercises in the same way. But the last go-round, the South Koreans fired one from an airport and it went kablooey. So poor Decker Eveleth was like scouring, scouring South Korean neighborhoods around the airbase looking for burn marks.

Aaron 23:42

We found where the warhead landed.

Jeffrey 23:44

We found where the warhead, where the warhead landed. But apparently the missile body, I guess the warhead popped off and then the missile body landed someplace else. And I and led to a huge fire. But weirdly, we we didn't see much evidence of the fire.

Aaron 24:02

I mean, you guys are always going to have business. I guess we're always going to have podcasts to talk about as long as they keep firing the stuff off. But I guess the homework assignment for people in our Slack channel and for your team of RAs is to go find those storage bunkers for nuclear warheads to see if they're centralized, dispersed, or maybe on Kim Jong-un's private boat somewhere.

Jeffrey 24:23

Maybe we should talk to Planet and see if we can put some satellite images up. Maybe we can do this as a team.

Aaron 24:31

This would be kind of fun.

Jeffrey 24:32

It's a good idea, Aaron.

Aaron 24:33

Yeah, we can, I don't know, do it as an arms control long super exclusive.

Jeffrey 24:38

Yeah, I think that would be really fun. Now, how exactly could people get access to that Slack channel? I'm curious.

Aaron 24:44

Oh, I know how they can get access. You can go to patreon.com slash ACW podcast, $3 if you're a student, $5 if you are not. You join the world's coolest, most exclusive, most cited, most excellent Slack conversation about all things nuclear open source, so much so that you can be cited in the Washington Post, Or The Economist because you are that good.

Again, patreon.com slash ACW podcast. It is the place to be to follow the debate. Discussion? To follow the discussion. So with that, Jeffrey, thanks for the discussion. Awesome to talk to you. Thanks, everybody, for listening.