How Sting Likes to Test

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'm Aaron Stein, Chief Content Officer at War on the Rocks, and I am wearing my super secret shades because that North Korean ICBM stayed in the air a very, very long time.

Jeffrey 0:32

Oh, oh my God.

Aaron 0:37

So it was taking place as Twitter was melting down. And so we were all exchanging messages about like, is this it? And then somebody then sent me a link. Nobody was paying attention that the North Koreans fired off an ICBM, except for us sadists. And then Adam Rawnsley, friend of the show, texted me. He's like, it's been 60 minutes.

This still hasn't fallen back to earth yet. What's going on? I'm just like, well, we may all go up in smoke.

Jeffrey 1:04

Long journeys take longer. ICBM length journeys, especially when you loft the f*** out of them, you know.

Aaron 1:13

Yeah. Yeah, 60 minutes. That's a good sort of long experience. Maybe you should give the listeners a background about what the hell we're talking about.

Jeffrey 1:23

So North Korea launched an ICBM, and they launched it on a highly lofted trajectory where it went 6,000 kilometers up, which is like, you know, really far up there. I think people don't understand that, you know, like satellites are at like a few to several hundred kilometers, at least most of them in low Earth orbit, so like way up over the where the International Space Station is.

And it fell about 1,000 kilometers downrange. So if they had straightened that out and flown that on a normal or what technically would be called a minimum energy trajectory to maximize its range, well now, that really would have gotten somewhere.

Aaron 2:11

Yeah, I mean... You know, I think what else we need to talk about is that as this was going on, we had the shelter-in-place orders again from Masao Air Base. And so I don't think people really knew where it was going to fall as it was sitting up there in the air or in space for a good 60 minutes there.

Jeffrey 2:29

Yeah, well, I mean, that's what happens when you loft the f*** out of something, right? I mean, it goes up and, you know, it's... I don't think that our systems are optimized for tracking things on those highly lofted trajectories. I mean, I suspect they can do it, but at the same time, the system is designed to spot something coming in at you.

Yeah, so good times.

Aaron 2:59

Yeah, and Kim really wanted to art this one up. And so the pictures were very staged. And I think he revealed his daughter.

Jeffrey 3:08

Yeah, this was the ultimate take your daughter to work power move.

Aaron 3:12

That's right.

Jeffrey 3:14

Normally, it's just like, hey, baby, I got you a pony. This is next level.

Aaron 3:21

Well, I guess we should start with the missile itself. So the daughter reveal was interesting, a little quirky, very North Korean. But the missile is also interesting as well for what it revealed from those photographs.

Jeffrey 3:32

Yeah, Michael Dutzman and I have spent the entire weekend working out a model of this thing. So if you're just coming to this, North Korea showed us this missile, the Hwasong-17, a couple of years ago in a parade. And they claim to have successfully tested it earlier this year, although for a variety of reasons, we think that they did launch it, but it didn't work out.

And so we were actually skeptical it had been successfully tested, as were people like Colin Zwerko at NK News. And honestly, from the celebration on their faces, my sense is that this was in fact the first successful launch. So we knew some things about the rocket going in, But our ability to model it really changes once we see it work, and we're pretty sure that the pictures we're looking at are of the thing that traveled the distance that got detected, right? Because I think in the previous one of this particular missile type is that there was questions about whether or not like the images were.

Aaron 4:42

Like spliced together, I think is the right way to say it. So it looked like the launch was successful.

Jeffrey 4:47

Yeah, I mean, what I would say is that they had real video from the launch that failed. But the video was clearly from the day that things didn't work. Right, and so what we realized is whatever they tested a few days later that did work, you know, our suspicion was it couldn't be the same thing because they would have just shown this video of the successful test, and they, you know, they haven't built a monument.

So, you know, I don't know. Our strong suspicion is that the first test was deeply misleading. This, though, I mean, you know, like, as best we can tell, it's the real deal. There is a burn scar where the thing was launched on the day they said it was launched. The shadows and the time all seem to match up.

Like, I think this is a real test.

Aaron 5:43

I think it's definitely true because the altitudes involved, 6,000 kilometers is something special, 1,000 kilometers downrange. And then the flight time that we alluded to in the beginning certainly suggests that this was all a successful test straight from launch to impact in the ocean. And again, I mean, the missile does look a little different, I think, from previous pictures that they've shown us, which suggests that maybe it's been redesigned a little bit or some of the issues are they're making iterative design choices about it as they go through their test cycle here.

Jeffrey 6:18

Yeah, that's right. We've measured each version, and this version is different in some interesting ways. So the way in which the missile is the same is it has four chambers with four nozzles, which weirdly is two engines because you get one turbo pump with basically a pair of combustion chambers and nozzles. That's the same. That's the so-called 80-ton engine that the North Koreans announced a few years ago and that they co-developed with Iran and that they were sanctioned for.

I don't think it actually, which we can get to, pushes with anything like 80 tons of thrust. But that's the engine. But everything else about the missile is subtly different. So it looks like the size of the rocket of the first stage is a little bit different. It looks like the size of the second stage has been edited, not edited, but has been revised from previous launches.

And so there's a lot that's really interesting about this missile. So for example, the first stage, We're able, because we know how long the missile is from measuring it, and we have an estimate of how much it weighs, because it's a certain size and propellant weighs a certain amount. We were able to measure the acceleration of the rocket, and we're getting a pretty consistent 2.8 meters per second squared, which works out to 100, 110 tons of thrust, which is a lot less than 160, which is what you'd get if you put 280 ton engines together.

So that's interesting. It's not crazy because actually 160 tons of thrust would be way too freaking much for a rocket of that size. You know, normally you want your thrust to weight to be like about 1.4 to 1. And so, you know, it's like 105, maybe 110. That's at sea level. So like in a vacuum, call that 120.

And like now I'm just grossly rounding. And that works out to almost perfectly 1.4 to 1, right? Like it's like a... 80-ton rocket with 110, 120-ton engine. That's beautiful. So we actually now have some sense of the performance of the rocket engine, which is cool.

Aaron 8:46

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, no, and I guess for arms control on junkies, like I think we've talked about this at each stage of its development, which I find to be really cool also. Like if you go back and look at some of our archives, we talk about the 80 ton engine. I think they showed the test standoff. We talked about that as well.

And now you're seeing it like through the entire process. So our podcast has literally been documenting this as they've been showing it to us.

Jeffrey 9:14

Well, yeah, I mean, it unfolded in this sense that there was this announcement they were working on an 80 ton engine in US Treasury documents because the US sanctioned the Iranian entities that were cooperating with the North Koreans.

Aaron 9:28

Yeah.

Jeffrey 9:29

And then we saw the engine test in which the North Koreans happily called it the 80 ton engine, just so we knew that they had tested the thing that we had sanctioned the Iranians over. Then we watched them put variants of that engine in 2017 in the Hwasong-12 and the 14 and the 15. And then we saw the 17 in a parade a few years later with the pair of engines and the four nozzles.

And then we saw the video this year of the first test, which, you know, I don't think worked. And now we see the successful test. So, yeah, every step of the way as this thing has come along into its full flowering, there have been words and pictures and work for us to do.

Aaron 10:19

Yeah, it's sort of like... They do involve, they do do a lot of sort of trickery, particularly when tests don't work. And they do a lot of, if you listen to the previous podcast, they do a lot of Photoshop, you know, which makes your lives difficult. But in the other sense, so in that sense, they're opaque. But in the other sense, they're quite open as to where they're going.

And they don't really leave much to the imagination. It's the full frontal of missile development.

Jeffrey 10:44

Mean this is the joke I keep telling which never gets a laugh, but I am going to continue telling it until someone finds it funny. Kim Jong-un gave a speech, right, in which he announced they were going to develop this thing. They showed us this thing in a parade. He gave an another speech in front of the thing.

And that was at the defense Expo where afterwards like they all sat down and had beer and like cigarettes and food together and so I always say you know he took the thing to a parade he gave a speech in front of it and he bought it a beer and now he brought his daughter to meet it now now he brought his daughter to meet it that's right I'd be like what yeah so We have seen this thing pretty consistently, and now we're sort of working on the rest of it because what we can see performing is the first stage.

But the missile has a second stage, and we think it has a post-boost vehicle or bus that's going to maneuver in order to release multiple warheads. Right. And we now have, and so I was burying the lead a little bit. Michael Dutzman noticed something really interesting that tells us a lot about the second stage, which is to say it's a much better second stage than we've ever seen them design.

Aaron 12:11

Well, can you do the big reveal on the show here? Absolutely.

Jeffrey 12:15

That was totally a tease.

Aaron 12:16

If we had sponsors, we'd cut to a commercial, but we don't have it yet. So we'll come right back right now. Don't leave us hanging.

Jeffrey 12:22

Yeah, that's right.

Aaron 12:23

We try to sell you some Viagra or... Or a political ad if it was back in October.

Jeffrey 12:31

So Michael isn't the only person who noticed this, but if you look at the second stage... There are these indentations with, I think it's a set of four nozzles, which are for roll control. Basically, the nozzles are pointing to the side, and so this helps you control the roll of the missile as it's going up, or at least of the second stage.

You don't need that In the upper stage that the North Koreans showed us previously because they had two little tiny steering engines and those were gimballed. So between the two of them, you could do all kinds of stabilization plus roll control if you wanted. But if you have a single nozzle, Can only move in two dimensions and so you it can do pitch and yaw but it can't do roll control and so the what michael realized was the implication of the roll control thrusters is that they have moved from the crappy two steering engine upper stage that we saw them put on the hua song 14 To something fancier, probably with a single nozzle.

And then, now there's another breadcrumb that they left for us. In 2019, they bragged about how they did a seven minute long rocket engine test.

Aaron 14:16

Right, I call that the tantric test.

Jeffrey 14:22

It's like sting .

Aaron 14:23

Yeah, that's the episode title, but go ahead. This is why this show does so well with I know, I know.

Jeffrey 14:34

So there is a really fancy upper stage that burns for seven minutes. And it's made by the same people who make the rocket stage that the rocket engines in the first stage that the North Koreans copied. I, I think I know who it is. Can we say it? Our friends at Yuzhnoi in yeah, I was about to say they're the good guys right now, but they're the good guys, they're the good guys. Well, it's not, it's probably not their fault. I mean, Ukraine arrested a bunch of North Koreans who were trying to access technology illegally at usually, so I think my sense is that the, my sense is that the, the Ukrainians.

And to some extent, the Russians, who also were in the Soviet era, I think it was was involved in the design of the thing. I don't think anyone deliberately helped the North Koreans. I just think the North Koreans picked this out as a design. And things in museums, and they market it, and that knowledge is out there.

So there is a, there is a Ukrainian upper stage for the Cyclone and called what the RD 861K, I'll probably, probably mess that up, which is really, really capable, and I'm not sure the North Korean variant is like quite as good but. That's the kind of implication of the roll control, is that they have moved from the old, less effective upper stage using two steering engines to something using a single nozzle.

And then you have to guess, well, what would that be? Because they haven't shown us a picture. And the breadcrumb they gave us was the seven-minute burn. And the little bit of information we know is that a couple of North Koreans were arrested trying to get that kind of information, or at least generally similar information from Yushnoy.

Aaron 16:45

So like, ha ha! Well, I guess you should also translate that for the listeners, is that I think that will increase accuracy and increase range.

Jeffrey 16:55

Well, so I think the bus, which we can talk about in a second, will increase accuracy. But yeah, this thing is going to go to 10,000 kilometers, no problem. And it's going to put like three warheads. You know, it's going to depend on the size of the warheads. And it's really, like all rockets, it's super sensitive to tiny differences in payload.

So it makes a really big difference if you think your reentry vehicle is going to be 450 kilograms instead of 500. Right, right, or if it's a thousand, like a few hundred kilograms, or even a few tens of kilograms on the top end, is going to make a huge difference. So there are a bunch of engineering questions that are just, I, we don't have enough information to answer, but you know, something like that Ukrainian upper stage makes for a very, very, very credible ICBM.

So then the other thing that that raises the question of is like, where is the post-boost vehicle coming from? Because we know that they've been testing attitude control. I mean, they announced that. I mean, they said it was for like turning a camera on a rocket.

Aaron 18:03

That's right.

Jeffrey 18:04

That's right. They took pictures of the earth. Like, yeah, well, turning backwards... Is a thing you do in space, but you do it to drop MIRVs. That's why you turn around backwards and look at where you came from. And so it's really clear that they've been testing a system to do that.

Aaron 18:26

Ushnoy's got one of those too.

Jeffrey 18:29

They got a space tug, which is a repurposed PBV for sale.

Aaron 18:35

We've talked about, again, we've talked about this on a previous podcast too, so listeners can go down the rabbit hole.

Jeffrey 18:41

I think we went through the online brochure. Yeah. Now, I mean, the reality is we haven't seen any of these things yet. And this is like the classic problem of open sources. You can kind of infer what they must be working on. But ultimately, it's up to them to decide whether they want to keep playing this stupid game of leaving us breadcrumbs or whether like Kim Jong-un just like wants to walk through the factory at Sanamdong and like pose next to the PBV, which I suspect he will eventually do, right?

Aaron 19:10

We would encourage him to do that. It's more content for us. And we have a podcast where we talk about this stuff.

Jeffrey 19:15

I mean, I'm down with it. If he wants to take his daughter, that's cool. Let her climb on the PBV.

Aaron 19:21

Sure.

Jeffrey 19:22

Yeah, why not? It's like a playground. It's a cute kid. Yeah, I got nothing bad to say about her, although you know, I, I often imagine that, you know, given her age, she probably has like her own little cell phone, and so I, like, imagine her like in the corner, like, like playing some game and like texting her like other little North Korean elite friends, like, oh my god, dad is totally making me go to another of these missile tests.

I'm so over it, LOL, which is exactly how my daughter acts.

Aaron 19:53

Yeah, and that would be a good thing to watch that phone in case she snaps pictures and uploads them to her burner account on Instagram. Oh, well, that would be great, yeah.

Jeffrey 20:02

It's actually untrue about my daughter. I took my daughter to the Boston Science Museum and she loved it, but she's also an elementary schooler. They just only have so much attention. Yeah and my guess is they're not as interested in Ukrainian rocket and missile parts as you are at least now you know the one serious thing I would say about that is this has become a theme that Kim jong-un has been picking up on which is the idea that what he's doing he's doing for future Generations Really didn't realize that, yeah. So there's been, there have been some quotes along that line, and, and so it's sort of like how do you justify these massive military expenditures, and that, and the answer is, you know, for him, he presents it as an intergenerational commitment to securing the future of the country, so like bringing the kid and the wife is like not.

Wildly out of character with the way in which their propaganda has started to reframe these, these things, you know, it's not about him which you know, like that's one of the reasons I don't love it when people say, oh, it's about prestige, like, yeah, okay, there is some prestige, but it's, I think it's a, it's an argument about like why the Kim family should rule the country and they're really big on the, the generational thing. I mean, I think he just likes kids to be honest, as we've discussed.

Aaron 21:19

We have, we have.

Jeffrey 21:21

I think that propaganda resonates with him. Like I think the man actually likes children.

Aaron 21:28

It's so bizarre. I always feel like on this podcast, we end up humanizing him. And by all accounts, I think he murdered his uncle with an anti-aircraft gun.

Jeffrey 21:35

I don't know how they executed him, but he definitely had his uncle executed. And then, as I always say, had two thoughts rub VX in his half-brother's face.

Aaron 21:43

Yeah. So he may like the kids, but he's also a sadist. You guys also did some cool modeling work with... I don't want to screw it up, but you were able to detect the missile launch with something other than just the reports on Twitter. Because if Twitter does go down, you have something else where you can get these early reports.

Jeffrey 22:08

Yeah. I mean... If you have ever wanted a great freaking segue to the end of the show and the ACW Slack channel, we have now for like two years had a secret project which emerged on the Slack channel, which then broke out into the wild where Tyler Nighswander and Mike Newt, two ACW Patreon patrons, Built with my encouragement. I didn't really contribute anything useful you know, I was like a cheerleader, but they burn, baby, burn. Yeah, that's right. They've, well, you know, they built a tool that detects.

Space launches and some missile launches, because when a big rocket, this doesn't work great for like little rockets that are at like low altitudes, but when a big rocket gets up into the ionosphere, it disrupts the ionosphere. It creates a, an ionospheric disruption, and that interferes with the passage of signals from GPS satellites to ground stations. And so the ground stations detect that interference because there's like a brief moment when the signal doesn't arrive in the way it should.

And you can tell because you know where the satellite is, right? And you know what it was before and after. And so you can tell you just have this like anomalous data reading. Basically, the system issues corrections for this. I am now way out of my depth and am grossly simplifying this and almost certainly getting key features wrong.

But the simple version is that you can see ionospheric disturbances from rocket launches in GPS data.

Aaron 24:21

And they can see that and then they can pull it and then you can basically see where the rocket launch was. That's right.

Jeffrey 24:26

Well, certainly you can confirm there was a rocket launch. So we have successfully implemented this using Japanese GPS data for North Korea because the, you know, sometimes the satellites are pretty low in the sky and they're looking at the line of sight where the rocket would pass. Like even if the rockets over North Korea, the satellite might be on one side and the Japanese station is on the other.

So then the rocket plume will be in between them when it's in the ionosphere, and that will detect the disturbance. So yeah, we have detected both a South Korean space launch and a number of North Korean ICBM launches, including this one, based on the ionospheric disturbance, now. The Japanese and the South Koreans just go ahead and announce these things with or without us, so they announce it pretty quickly, often before we. Only pull the data once every hour. We could pull it more frequently than that, but like, and cost a lot of money, and who has money but we can now go back in the data and confirm like, yes, they said there was an ICBM launch, like, I can see it.

And we put it on Twitter and people seem to like it, which I think is really cool. It really only works for big rockets that go pretty high. So it's great for lofted ICBM tests and it's great for space launches. It's less good for medium range missile tests. Although with time and maybe some of that money I just complained we didn't have, maybe we could make it a little better.

Aaron 26:06

Well, that's a contract or a grant that I think people would be willing to fund. So if you're listening, reach out to Jeffrey and see if we can't make this go bigger. Should I do the readout here now? I mean, that was your segue, man. Well, with that, I can't think of any better plug for our Slack channel where we have people who are able to do this, which I promise you, Jeffrey and I cannot.

I certainly cannot. So if you want to join that elite club, get past the velvet ropes, if you will, head on over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast, $3. If you're a student, $5. If you are not, you get access to the club where you can build very, very, very cool things that will get shown on Twitter, get quoted in the Washington Post.

And even get written about in The Economist because that's just the club that we are. So patreon.com slash hwpodcast. Jeffrey, it's been good chatting with you.

Jeffrey 26:59

That was awesome to talk to you, Aaron.