A post written with Allison Berke…
While the locations of many of North Korea’s most important nuclear facilities are known to the general public, one of North Korea’s more obscure locations has remained a mystery.
In the mid-1980s, North Korea created an Institute for Atomic Energy in Pyongyang to house a 20 MeV cyclotron imported from the Soviet Union with the assistance of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Until now, however, the location of the Institute of Atomic Energy in Pyongyang has not been disclosed despite the fact that the location was known to the IAEA and has hosted other foreign visitors from nongovernmental organizations.
We geolocated the IAE in Pyongyang using information found in IAEA technical assistance documents and, crucially, an exterior image of the building. The cyclotron building is located at 39.029°N, 125.668°W. The cyclotron building is situated in a complex that contains several other buildings, including at least one large administrative building.
The Institute for Atomic Energy is by no means the most important nuclear facility in North Korea, but it is an element of North Korea’s civil nuclear infrastructure worth keeping a (digital) eye on.
Geolocating the Institute for Atomic Energy
There are 8 MGC-20 cyclotrons, produced by D.V. Efremov Institute of Electrophysical Apparatus (JSC “NIIEFA”), currently in operation around the world, including at four sites in Russia (three in St. Petersburg and one in Moscow) as well as at sites in Finland, Hungary, Egypt and, of course, North Korea. Although some of these cyclotrons are in purpose-built facilities, there are no apparent external signatures that would allow an analyst to confidently identify a building used for the operation of an MGC-20 type cyclotron from imagery alone. The challenge in identifying this type of facility is presented in Figure 1.
Figure 1: MGC-20 Cyclotron Facilities Lack a Strong External Signature
The IAEA publishes summaries of technical assistance projects in an annual report, which is freely available. An entry summarizing the cyclotron project is available in Figure 2. The IAEA also used to host summaries online, but these have been put behind a paywall. They are still available from the internet archive if you know the URL. The Center for Nonproliferation Studies has a large repository of files, originally collected by Dan Pinkston, which includes printouts of these summaries as well as some other IAEA Technical Cooperation documents. These documents contain a significant amount of information about the IAEA’s technical cooperation with Pyongyang. The IAEA documents describe the facility as being in the Mangyongdae District, indicate that construction started in 1987 and that the building was completed by July 1990, that cyclotron components were delivered in 1989-1990, and that the cyclotron was commissioned in April 1992. The documents also detail training activities undertaken by North Korean scientists in Russia and Europe.
Figure 2: IAEA Technical Cooperation Documents Detail The Cyclotron Project
In addition to information by the IAEA, the Institute of Atomic Energy has been visited twice by nongovernmental experts – once by David Albright and Joel Wit in February 2007 and once by Sigfried Hecker and John Merrill in August 2007. Hecker described the Institute of Atomic Energy as a relatively old, rundown facility:
We visited the small cyclotron laboratory in which the North Korean scientists conducted nuclear physics research. It was a small, dated facility, although I enjoyed the enthusiasm of the elderly director who showed us around in the sweltering heat without electricity in the building. He told us that power outages were sufficiently common to greatly limit their research programs. At one point the power failed, and the small room went dark. The director laughed and said he was grateful to the United States for cutting off the heavy fuel oil shipments because now his technicians were accomplished at completely taking apart and putting the machine back together in the dark.
The only public image of the cyclotron is taken from inside the facility by Sigfried Hecker.
Figure 3: Siegfried Hecker with the MGC-20 Cyclotron at the Institute of Atomic Energy in Pyongyang.
In circumstances we won’t detail, one of us viewed materials that included images of what we recognized as the Institute of Atomic Energy. In the image, a high-rise apartment building was clearly visible in the distance that indicated the facility was close to Kwangbok Street, a neighborhood in Mangyongdae of distinct high-rise apartment buildings constructed for the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students held in 1989. Figure 4 shows an illustration and photograph of Kwangbok Street, which is quite distinctive.
Figure 4: Illustration and Photograph of Kwangbok Street in Mangyongdae, Pyongyang
We could not keep the images, but one of us made a sketch of the layout of the building and the surrounding area. The building in the image had a number of unique features, including a distinct pattern of windows and doors. There were also a number of other details about the setting, including adjacent buildings, roads and walls. These details match a building located at: 39.029°N, 125.668°W
Figure 5: Illustration of the Cyclotron Building and satellite image of the matching building in Mangyongdae.
According to IAEA documents, the construction on the building began in 1987 and was completed by July 1990. A review of satellite imagery from that period confirms that construction on this building began in 1987 and was externally complete by the end of summer 1990. Below are two composite images showing the status of the facility in June 1987 and in October 1990. In June 1987, no building was present – but ground-scarring can be seen indicating that construction is in the early phases. In October 1990, the building appeared to be externally complete. The fact that the construction timeline of the building matches what we know about the cyclotron facility increases our confidence in the geolocation.
Figure 6: Satellite Images from 1987 and 1990 showing construction of the cyclotron building
Left: A color-composite satellite image using pan-chromatic SPOT data from June 16, 1987 and LANDSAT multispectral data from September 1987. Right: A color-composite satellite image using panchromatic SPOT data from October 22, 1987 and multi-spectral LANDSAT data from October 24, 1987.
The 1990 image confirms other details seen in the 1992 image – namely the presence of high-rise buildings of Kwangbok Street visible in the original image.
In the mid-2000s, North Korea constructed a large second building next to the original cyclotron building, as well as support buildings. Albright and Wit stated that, during their visit in February 2007, they were told that “construction restarted” on the “large building next door” to the cyclotron building and “should be completed soon.” “Ri Kwang [Yong, the director of the institute] said that the institute will more than double in size after the new building is completed.”
Figure 7: Institute of Atomic Energy in 2007
The site is not of major interest from the perspective of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. Assistance from Russia might result in new equipment or upgrades. The same model of cyclotron, used at the Institute of Nuclear Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, was upgraded in 2000 after 15 years of operation. The renewal process for that cyclotron included updates to the vacuum, gas supply, and control systems, suggesting that similar upgrades would have been needed for the North Korean cyclotron in approximately 2007.
