KN-11 Ashore

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

I'm thinking not even Keith Richards wants to huff solid propellant exhaust. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:30

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Luffy Career Center for the Middle East. From sunny and very windy Philadelphia. And also a special guest, my son in the background. So you may hear him on the podcast.

Scott LaFoy 0:42

And I am Scott LaFoy, producer at the Arms Control Long podcast and imagery analyst from surprisingly sunny and dangerously windy Washington, D.C. Hey, we're all here.

Jeffrey 0:53

Now the question is, Aaron, can we really make your son a senior fellow? At the arms control wonk pod?

Aaron 1:01

I think you can.

Jeffrey 1:02

I mean, he has to be maybe a junior fellow or a toddler fellow.

Aaron 1:06

Junior fellow. This is his second episode. He's going to make a cameo. He talked with Scott and I when you called in sick for the Turkey Jupiter podcast.

Scott 1:16

He's very insightful for multipolar nuclear balance.

Jeffrey 1:20

Hey, I think the way NSC staff are dropping, we just make him a senior fellow now, and he'll be replacing KT McFarlane in six years.

Aaron 1:30

He has about as much experience as some of them. Yeah. Better chance of getting clearance, too.

Jeffrey 1:37

Well.

Aaron 1:39

He does have two passports. Oh, there you go.

Jeffrey 1:43

Hey. North Korea tested a new solid fuel missile from a land mobile launcher near Kusong. I told you so. Yep, you did.

Aaron 1:55

This is one of those podcasts, again, because the North Koreans just continue to cause a ruckus where I should just step aside and ask informed questions because I think you guys are way, way, way excited to talk about this.

Jeffrey 2:07

Well, because we predicted it like a year ago.

Aaron 2:12

You did write it down in foreign policy, but I think I said, I told you so paragraph.

Jeffrey 2:15

Yeah. Well, there's both. I predicted two things I'm very proud of. One is that North Korea would shift over to solid fuels in a big, big way, which we already kind of knew because we saw the solid fuel test of the submarine launched version of this missile. But then the other thing that I predicted in the course of – there was the debate about deploying THAAD in South Korea, the missile defense system.

I said, look, everybody was saying like, oh, well, the submarine-launched ballistic missile, it's years away because they still have to get the submarine all perfect. I was like, they're just going to put it on a truck.

Aaron 2:49

An ugly truck.

Jeffrey 2:50

Yeah, oh god, that's an ugly truck. Hey, I feel like Homer Simpson where he's like, I am so smart, smrt. We did god, yeah. what a launch. Yeah, this was a big one. It had tank treads on it. It's a tracked tail. Yeah. So I think we should talk about the missile. Then we should talk about the transporter erector launcher.

Anytime these things get popular, I realize how much jargon we use and people are like, what is a transporter erector launcher? And then maybe we should talk a little bit about what the system means for preemption and missile defense. What do you guys think about that?

Aaron 3:38

Love it. Love it. Why don't we start at the beginning? What just happened with the launch?

Jeffrey 3:42

Yeah, so, you know, I was sitting at a kid's birthday party. After the birthday party, we went and saw a stage production of Madagascar. My phone's buzzing in my pocket the whole time.

Aaron 3:59

That's great. You have to look, right? In the dark in theater.

Jeffrey 4:02

No, I didn't. I was really good. But boy, when I checked at intermission, things were crazy.

Aaron 4:06

Then we went to my off-campus office.

Scott 4:10

Yeah, I saw the picture of your off-campus office. It was a very burdensome beach is what it looked like to me.

Jeffrey 4:17

Hey, you know, I've had to purchase a wallet with a zipper to keep the sand out. I want you to know it's an enormous hardship. Actually, I went through my phone battery, and then I went through an auxiliary phone battery.

Aaron 4:33

So I was looking for real estate yesterday, and then I hear about the launch, you know, because driving from one place to the other. And then I immediately plugged in Jeffrey's name to get the briefing, and nothing was up. I was like, Jeffrey must be in a coma or something because there was a delay in the time of the launch between when you began your tweetstorms.

Jeffrey 4:54

Well, you know, well, so, you know, I guess actually I I'm you know, the period I'm talking about was once we start to figure out what it was. I was actually up at Stanford the day before when there was a report of a launch. But at that point, there was like no detail at all. Right. So I guess this this segues nicely into the missile, because at first the announcement came from Stratcom the day before my beach day.

And it just said that it was a medium or intermediate range ballistic missile.

Scott 5:25

And for listeners, that is a pretty big range in what those two phrases mean. An MRBM to an IRBM is at, what, from 1,000 up to 5,500 kilometers.

Jeffrey 5:37

Yeah, the medium range is like 1 to 3, and then the IRBM part kicks in after that.

Scott 5:43

Yeah, it's 3 to 5.5, and then above 5.5 is an ICBM in U.S. terminology.

Jeffrey 5:50

Yeah. So those are like really different missiles. And, you know, there's an enormous difference between a Nodong, which is a medium range ballistic missile, and a Musudan, which is probably an intermediate range ballistic missile. Sort of depends, like your mileage may vary. So one thing that's really come up – Scott, I don't know if you do this, but like – so when the U.S. says it's medium or intermediate range and the South Koreans say it's a nodong or a musudan, which is just a more specific way of saying that, I think people assume that – We must know or that it's easy to know.

And, and of course it's not right. Like you have ground-based radars and, and we notice that the Japanese and South Koreans, if a, if a missile blows up early, they never see it. Right. So the early South Korean and Japanese reports are like two missiles were launched. Then like later it's the U S using satellites were like, yeah, actually it was three But, you know, this is a case where it's just one.

But, you know, as far as I can tell, all they're doing is trying to infer the missile type based on the trajectory.

Scott 7:00

Right. And for this one, we got a weird apogee and a weird range that don't really line up with what we expected in that it formed a box. It was like a pretty close to a square that was formed because it was a range of like 500 kilometers with an apogee of 550 kilometers. Right.

Jeffrey 7:20

Yeah, so when we got that data, I went to, I was talking to Pollack, Josh Pollack, and we then started, we actually have like a, I've been calling it a library, which makes it sound really fancy, and it's not. Like, on my computer, we have a bunch of different trajectories from past tests. And David Wright at the Union of Concerned Scientists had done this one.

It turns out that 500-500 trajectory Perfectly matched North Korea's solid-fueled KN-11 SLBM test from last year. So we were like, oh my god, Jeffrey was right.

Aaron 8:08

If I do say so myself.

Jeffrey 8:10

If I do. Well, you know. Which you did. Yeah.

Aaron 8:15

But you did. I'm messing with you. I'm messing with you.

Jeffrey 8:17

No, but you got to do it. It's just terrible. So for many years, I always thought, oh, you have to be really nice about this stuff. And, like, people would steal ideas. And I actually don't think they were stealing them. It's like you persuade someone of something and they think it's such a good idea that they think they thought of it.

And so I feel like I both have to spend time putting down flags and then a fair amount of time screaming loudly about the prior placement of the flag. So anyway, we went back. David Wright wrote a really nice post. So I tweeted out like, oh, God, that matches the trajectory of the KN-11 SLBM perfectly. And David Wright is the one who'd actually taken the apogee and downrange data from that test and the model of the missile and turned it into a real trajectory.

Yeah.

Scott 9:10

Right, estimating what its minimum energy would be instead of if it was a... That's right.

Jeffrey 9:14

But then we had it, right? Because so suddenly... And it was really interesting. It was not easy to persuade people. It's funny because I know this is how the US and Japan and the ROK do it. But enough of their data leaked that we were able to recreate their analysis. Mm-hmm. But actually do it a little better than at least their press people did.

Hmm. But I couldn't persuade anybody really until the North Korean statement came out where they said what it was and then obviously the pictures. So the first question I got when we didn't know what it was and people thought it might be an ICBM or a partial ICBM test was, hey, can their missiles make it to Mar-a-Lago?

Scott 9:56

Yeah.

Jeffrey 9:59

And I couldn't tell if the person was just trying to get a handle on the range or secretly hoping that the North Koreans were going to attack him. Can you imagine if the North Koreans used a nuclear weapon against Mar-a-Lago?

Aaron 10:12

Oh, the humanity! There are finger sandwiches everywhere!

Jeffrey 10:18

Shattered golf clubs! Bereaved trophy wives!

Aaron 10:27

200,000 ahead, too, just up in smoke.

Jeffrey 10:30

Well, you know, those people, we shouldn't make fun of them. We should be interviewing them because they had a ringside seat for the intelligence briefing.

Scott 10:41

Oh, that would be incredible to hear.

Jeffrey 10:44

Apparently it was incredible to hear. People took pictures, posted it to Facebook. Did you not see this, Scott?

Scott 10:51

No, I have. I believe one of our wonderful backers actually posted one of the images that got around in Slack.

Aaron 10:59

The images are jaw-dropping. I saw them in the morning. I said, you cannot be serious. Like, they didn't even, like, go into, like, the huddle room or at least out into the hallway that separates the banquet room.

Scott 11:07

Do you think Mar-a-Lago has a skiff already set up? Skiffs are not trendy or gold-plated. There is no room for one.

Jeffrey 11:14

Even George W. Bush on 9-11, they found him a nice, quiet room at that elementary school.

Aaron 11:20

It was an extra room, you know, right in the middle.

Jeffrey 11:22

I feel like Donald Trump would have said, hey, you kids, get out of the way, and, like, pushed them in a corner, and they would have done the briefing right there.

Aaron 11:28

They could have gone into the wedding next door. Like, you know, the music would have at least obscured people from listening in on encrypted phones.

Jeffrey 11:35

Yeah, that was my favorite detail is there was apparently a keyboardist playing. I know. I'm just trying to imagine, like, what sort of terrible soft rock was playing in the background, you know, or maybe like yacht rock.

Aaron 11:53

It's scaring us back, you know. I think you should tell the listeners what the K-11 is.

Jeffrey 11:58

Okay, sorry, I was having a little too much fun. So the KN-11, you know, one of the interesting things that we have seen over the past year or so is that the North Koreans did a static test of a solid-fueled engine, right? So solid fuel is different than liquid fuel. So, you know, a liquid fuel missile, you have fuel and oxidizer, and you basically pump them.

And you pump them together, and when they contact... In air, they combust. And so you get the propulsion, right, that you need. And so the problem, of course, with that missile is, generally speaking, at least this is true for the North Korean ones, you have to fuel them before you fire them, which takes a long time and requires a whole bunch of trucks.

Scott found this amazing document that pointed out something which we'd always forgotten about. Which is like one of the biggest giveaways for a missile launch, is not the truck with the missile, it's the whole battery of trucks that carry the fuel.

Scott 13:01

Yeah, the enormous convoy. The Chinese DF-3 required something like 30 support trucks, some of which was fuel, a lot of which was other support people. You need a lot of people to run a 30-truck convoy, whereas the DF-21 required, I think it was eight support trucks total. Yeah.

Jeffrey 13:21

And so that's true of solid fuel missiles.

Scott 13:24

The fuel is already manufactured into them.

Jeffrey 13:26

And I know there are storable liquid propellants, but if you know storable liquid propellants, you know what I'm saying is still basically true. The fuel is manufactured into the solid-fueled missile. You can launch it really quickly, and it requires a much smaller support element. And so it's just going to be harder to find because you've got less time before it launches and fewer signatures.

And so it's like a way more impressive system. So when North Korea tested a solid-fueled missile out of a submarine... And everybody was like, chillax. It's a submarine. It's going to take them forever to get the submarine working. I was like, well, you better hope they don't put that on a truck.

Aaron 14:06

Yeah, and it also eliminates sort of one of the policy proposals put out so often, which is that you can hit it while it's being fueled. I think that is one of the things that also needs to be said, too.

Jeffrey 14:17

Well, yeah, and at some point we need to talk about the tell, but just as a general observation, lately we've had this interesting debate. There's a really nice piece by Mark Fitzpatrick and Mike Elliman talking about how vulnerable North Korea's liquid-fueled ICBMs would be. And the whole point of shifting over to solid fuel is to build an ICBM that does not suffer all of the disadvantages that they outlined, some of which are involved with the missile, principally the speed of launch.

But then, you know, North Korea's tell is pretty interesting. But we should talk a little bit more about the missile because there is some long porn.

Aaron 15:02

Big wonk porn that was flying around on social media.

Jeffrey 15:04

Scott, tell us about your wonk porn addiction.

Scott 15:07

Oh, I have an enormous, enormous shameful folder on my hard drive that is just pictures of emerging and reference missile systems so I can figure out what configurations are possibly related to others. Yesterday was a disgusting bacchanal of Wong Porn, frankly. So we got our Rodong Shinmun, and later KCNA released a bunch of imagery, about a dozen images each, I think, a little bit more, of the missile launch, as well as later follow-on video that came out, basically showing that it's cold-launched, which makes sense since it was an SLBM.

Aaron 15:50

Explain cold-launched.

Jeffrey 15:51

Yeah, before we do this, I think there are three things that we should talk about, right? We've got to talk about the cold launch, which you will have to explain. I think that little jet of flame is pretty interesting.

Scott 16:06

The one on the bottom?

Jeffrey 16:08

Uh-huh. And then I think we need to talk about the tippy top.

Scott 16:13

Yep, that's a technical term.

Jeffrey 16:16

Before we do any of those things... Something I just had a conversation about, I had no idea. People don't understand how we know it's solid.

Scott 16:23

Oh, yeah.

Jeffrey 16:27

I can't do a good job of explaining it. So, Scott, take a swing.

Scott 16:30

So, listeners, if you've ever seen King of the Hill, you know that propane burns clean.

Jeffrey 16:37

This is already so much better than the explanation I gave.

Scott 16:40

And you know that charcoal is real, real smoky. So liquid fuel missiles burn like clean burning propane. And when your missile is equipped with propane and propane accessories, it means that you basically have a fire that burns relatively clean, as in does not produce a very, very large plume of smoke. With some notable exceptions, like the Lance missile, where it had these weird storable liquid propellants.

So with some minimal exception, rockets burn clean. If you watch U.S. rockets fly, clean burning. If you watch the space shuttle, not clean burning, because the space shuttle had solid rocket boosters. Solid rocket boosters are dirty. They burn and produce enormous plumes of smoke when they burn.

Jeffrey 17:30

And they have crap in them like aluminum. Right.

Scott 17:32

Yeah, it's aluminum and ammonium perchlorate and binders. They are nasty. They are pretty much just disgusting dirty missiles, but it makes them way faster. Yeah, I'm tiptoeing around the wording here.

Jeffrey 17:47

No, no, but I'm sorry. I'm thinking not even Keith Richards wants to huff solid propellant exhaust.

Scott 18:00

Maybe a little bit of that sweet, sweet EDMH, though.

Jeffrey 18:04

Yeah, so it's really funny because we all looked at it and were like, oh, that's a solid rocket. People are like, how do you even? And it's like, well, that's the plume.

Scott 18:14

Yeah, it looks dirty and it has a plume. Yeah, that's not steam. Interestingly, if you burn liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, it basically is steam. Super steam. I'm going to get an angry technical email because that was a mischaracterization of Locke's.

Jeffrey 18:33

Well, so this is the thing I hate about this business is everything you say is false. Like, it's impossible to compare solid and liquid fuel because there are all of these exceptions. Like, well... What I'm saying about liquid fuel isn't exactly true about storable liquid propellants, but that's this whole other side conversation that, like, a podcast listener is just already hitting that little 15-second advance button on.

Scott 19:02

If you're an imagery analyst working with an imagery identification key, one of the first steps for a missile that is launching will be, is there a smoke trail? Yes or no. Generally, yes. Solid. Some exception. No. Liquid. Some exception. Okay.

Jeffrey 19:18

But that's the first step in it, so we know it's solid. And then now we have these three three questions about the cold launch, the cold launch, the jet of flame, and the business end. Yeah, the first two are related. Most likely they are related. I think so, yeah.

Scott 19:39

So cold launch, just for listeners, cold launch and hot launch differentiate methods. Basically tell you when the missile ignites. In a hot launch, that's what people would normally associate with space launch vehicles. You've got a rocket on the pad, you light it up, it catches on fire, it sends a bunch of fire down, it lifts off. That's kind of the default setting.

Usually in analyst reports, if a missile is hot launched, They don't necessarily specify that, but they will specify if it is a cold launched vehicle. Cold launch refers specifically to when the missile is inside a canister, just like a big tube that surrounds the missile. When it is launched, the canister is pressurized and a gas generator generates enough pressure to hurl a multi-meter long, multi-ton missile like 30 feet in the air, at which point it then ignites and fires.

Jeffrey 20:39

Have you ever seen a peacekeeper ejection test?

Scott 20:41

Oh my god. Peacekeeper nippers. There are some big, this, even this, the KN-11 cleared something like three times its own length in the air before it fires.

Jeffrey 20:55

Maybe we could put Donald Trump in one of those launchers and see how high we could get him.

Scott 21:00

Well, I worry a little bit, judging by the height at which it shot up. I assume that's probably an artifact of it being part of an SLBM-derived system, but I'm curious if it's meant to hurl a larger missile a smaller height in the future.

Jeffrey 21:18

Yeah, I think we should come back to that. We will. So, I mean, I love the pictures because so you see it popping up and you see the spacers flying out, right? There are these little bits of black debris which keep the missile in the middle of the canister and then they kind of fall away. But then there's that jet of flame that goes to the side.

Scott 21:39

Yeah, there is a second rocket attached horizontally to a part of the rocket so that it's not in the way when it actually ignites. Because it would potentially explode.

Jeffrey 21:50

Yeah. Which I was totally baffled by, but George Herbert and Marcus Schiller are the ones who said. Oh yeah, that's to kick it away from the... I'm not even sure if it's just to explode, but you were just going to hammer that thing in exhaust.

Scott 22:09

Oh, yeah, and it's going to come down really hard on any hardware and or people you have nearby. You need to get that thing far away. That's pretty, I wouldn't say common. A number of cold launch vehicles have that, but not all of them. And a number of SLBMs have it and similar things. And so we had a discussion as to whether or not it's just a protective cap or an igniter or the gas generator or a part of the gas generator system that generates the amount of pressure needed to once again hurl the missile several times its own length into the air.

Jeffrey 22:46

I think if you're deeply interested in this conversation, you should probably give us the three bucks a month to come over to the Slack channel.

Aaron 22:53

Yeah, because these conversations and the pictures are in the Slack channel.

Jeffrey 22:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also, I mean, I think the reason I mentioned this, and the other thing is the front end of the missile is different, right? And at least for me, I've been spending a lot of time looking at the really blunt noses of some Russian and the most recent Chinese submarine-launched ballistic missile. And, you know, it's surprising to me.

I hadn't really paid attention to what a big deal it is to get through the water.

Scott 23:23

Yeah.

Jeffrey 23:24

Like, it's really a big deal. And so you don't have to have that particular shape that you see on the submarine-launched ballistic missile. You can pick a different shape. And so the reason I highlight those last two things, the mini-engine, I guess you'd call it, depending on whatever it is that shoves the rocket to the side and then the different shape knows, one of the questions I got was like, Well, couldn't this just be a land-based test for the submarine?

And the answer is no, it's a different missile. I mean, it's the same missile, but it's been modified in ways that would need to be tested. Don't you agree, Scott?

Scott 24:04

Dot, dot, dot. I agree.

Jeffrey 24:08

Well, sorry, but that's important, right? Because people think like, well, okay, so we saw it launch from the ground, but like you told me it was a submarine-launched ballistic missile. So how do you know that they're going to deploy it in this manner? Yeah, and the answer is it has a lot of changes to it. So they tested it.

The reason they tested it from the ground was because they had to test the changes.

Scott 24:26

Well, and I think another argument that I would go with is if you're testing a new form of SLBM and maybe testing out a new shape and a new canister, a new pop-up system, any of that, you don't modify a very expensive vehicle to drive it around the middle of nowhere to test it. You test it at a stand, Or you test it at a static facility that's controlled.

You don't drive it into the outback and pop it out the top of a tank.

Jeffrey 24:54

That's too much risk. Scott, the people of Kusong, you're hurting their feelings.

Scott 24:57

I'm sorry. We do have many listeners in Kusong.

Jeffrey 24:59

Are you saying that Kusong is a jerkwater?

Scott 25:03

A what?

Jeffrey 25:04

A jerkwater. It's like a backwater, but slightly more offensive. I don't know.

Scott 25:11

You've never heard that? I have not.

Jeffrey 25:13

Oh, you know why you haven't? Because you're from Tennessee and no one would say it to your face.

Scott 25:20

That's why we don't have video chat on us, so you still don't have to.

Jeffrey 25:24

Yeah, well, I grew up in rural Illinois, and I definitely grew up in a jerk water. So, listen, that's actually a nice transition point, I think, because the location is something Dave Schmerler was able to geolocate. Did you want to go back to something?

Scott 25:40

I was about to say, we didn't actually talk about why the nose cone is interesting.

Jeffrey 25:45

Oh, well, why don't you tell me why the nose cone is interesting?

Scott 25:48

So in the KCTV briefer on the missile, so this is a North Korean press release. So if you haven't figured it out this long after being a listener, take everything that comes after this warning with a grain of salt because the North Koreans claimed it about their own missile. And that is that they claim it has evasive capabilities or capabilities that allow it to evade interceptors.

That's true. They say that we have to decide if we believe that I made that decision before they made that announcement. I do not believe so. This is interesting for like a couple reasons. We have the phrase evasive is going to be like the key phrase to analyze there because missiles have penetration aids like that's normal to have, you know.

Subsystems that deploy mid-flight, or early in flight, depends on the system, that confuse ballistic missile defenses. Not unusual. Balloons, chaff, various things. But saying evade... Implies that the re-entry vehicle is capable of maneuvering.

Jeffrey 26:58

Yeah, I agree, and no.

Scott 27:01

Yeah, that's technology that China is still working on right now, and China, to say the least, has a slightly larger budget than the North Koreans. The Iranians claim a similar thing on an anti-ship missile. And Aaron, I'm not sure if you have any familiarity with this. Do you know the, I think in English it's the Persian Gulf Missile?

Aaron 27:24

No, I'm not familiar with it.

Scott 27:26

Okay, it's something that like popped up.

Aaron 27:28

Hey, hey, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, ask Ollie. Ollie? Ollie's in his room playing quietly. I don't think you want to mess with Successor.

Scott 27:37

Come on, Dad! But basically, for the Iranians, there is a missile that they have claimed in the past is anti-ship ballistic, implying that it can maneuver to some degree. Claiming you have a reentry vehicle that can maneuver would be a very, very valuable asset. The Pershing, I believe, could do that. Pershing 2 could do a little bit of that so that the U.S. could mess with the Soviets.

Hypothetically, it is supposed to obviate interceptor systems, specifically THAAD and Patriot batteries being deployed to the Korean Peninsula. It's also really hard to do and really expensive, and I just don't believe them.

Jeffrey 28:17

So let me say, you are taking evade very literally.

Scott 28:23

Yes.

Jeffrey 28:24

I simply took evading interception to mean countermeasures of any kind.

Scott 28:31

No, no, I agree with that.

Jeffrey 28:32

So, you know, traditionally, especially if you talk to... Well, like, if you go back and look at our old intelligence estimates on the ballistic missile threat, we treat countermeasures as a pretty broad category of technologies. And so, for example, just the fact that the warhead separates... Or just the fact that maybe it's spin-stabilized. Or just the fact that maybe it has a radar-absorbing material.

It may be that that's what they're meaning. Because I noticed that in their announcement, what they said was that it was... Verified the position control and guidance in the middle section, and section of re-entry. I see Ali has serious feelings about missile defense penetration.

Aaron 29:26

He's back. He's back. He wants me to read him a book.

Scott 29:29

It's like, are you talking about spin stabilization? Because I got something to say.

Jeffrey 29:34

Dada, what's he call you?

Aaron 29:36

He's saying kashik, which is Turkish for spoon.

Jeffrey 29:39

Spoon. He calls you spoon.

Aaron 29:43

No, he calls kashik because he wants to eat Cheerios. I want to eat Cheerios.

Jeffrey 29:49

All right. Anyway, so they say that it refers to the section of reentry after separation of the improved warhead of the missile, which can be tipped with a nuclear warhead, the feature of invading, interception, et cetera. So I wonder if it's not just that A, it separates, and B, maybe it's like spin stabilized.

Scott 30:04

Yeah, and that would be very realistic. And also, do you want to dive in real quick to what a separating warhead would be as opposed to a unitary body?

Jeffrey 30:14

Why don't you just do it? Because you feel like there's a point to be made here.

Scott 30:19

No, just because we talked earlier about the sort of like industry terms. Like a separating warhead usually just means that the warhead comes in smaller than it launches. Scuds do not separate typically. Like I'm a little surprised that they make that announcement for a large missile because I would assume it separates.

Aaron 30:40

And I think you should drop in there why that matters for missile defense.

Scott 30:43

Oh, yeah. Well, it's much smaller. It's harder to see on radar if it's small. And it's harder to hit with a hit-to-kill interceptor, which is what we use if it's small. Jeffrey, do you have any more? I mean, I don't feel that's it.

Jeffrey 30:54

No, I'm actually furiously Googling the damn intelligence estimate that I was actually thinking about where they list penetration aids.

Scott 31:02

There's a great Union of Concerned Scientists countermeasures report, 2001. Oh, I love that thing. Yeah. It also literally suggests... I tell this joke to everyone. No one thinks it's funny but me. So the listeners now have to listen to it. And that's that they suggest as a way to hide the temperature signature, the infrared signature for a warhead, is to plate the entire warhead in gold.

To better facilitate the manipulation of its thermal image. And I just want to know if they put that in to see if anyone was reading at that point.

Jeffrey 31:35

I think the big takeaways are that it has a name that suggests that it is a follow-on to the submarine-launched ballistic missile, but that there are enough changes to that missile to demonstrate what the North Koreans say in their statement, which is this is a missile that is intended to be launched from a launcher on the ground.

Scott 31:53

Right.

Jeffrey 31:54

And so that is a chance to talk about the other reason that we think they're telling the truth, which is why on earth would you otherwise make the world's ugliest tracked transporter erector launcher if you didn't plan to deploy it that way?

Scott 32:09

Yeah, this was an expensive, this is an expensive toy to build. Making tells is an expensive process. And so building one of these, especially, not quite as unique as I thought, but a nearly unique form of tell.

Jeffrey 32:26

Yeah, well, so it turns out, yeah, two things. As I said, it was fugly online. And a Russian colleague emailed me to say, we build a lot of TELs that look like that. To me, they just look like TELs. And I was deciding that maybe I should have called it Vintage Soviet. But, you know, then maybe we could like use vintage Soviet as a kind of euphemism.

Yeah. So the Soviet Union did make tracked transporters, transporter erector launchers for their missiles early on.

Scott 32:58

Yeah.

Jeffrey 32:59

But they didn't they didn't do it for like a super long time. But this is definitely, you know, it's it's tracked. I mean, it looks like a missile transporter on top of a tank.

Scott 33:09

Which, because it is a missile transported on top of a tank.

Jeffrey 33:15

Probably a tank chassis, right?

Scott 33:18

Yeah. There's a couple thoughts on what it could be. There are a couple tank IDs that have been floated around by the Oryx folk and by Nathan Hunt and whatnot, in Hunt's group. It's different. I'm not a ground forces guy, so I actually don't know anything.

Jeffrey 33:35

Well, you know, I mean, one of the things I think is really interesting is, and I put a blog post up on this not too long ago, is maybe two years ago now, Kim Jong-un went to a factory near Kusong.

Scott 33:48

He did. And what did they make there? At least allegedly.

Jeffrey 33:53

No, I can see the tank bodies out in the field in some satellite photographs. They make tanks. And I'm presuming they make now one other... Treaded vehicle, at least a slightly longer tank. Yeah, slightly better range. So, I mean, I think this is really interesting because when we originally, you know, he visited the site, they didn't say what it did. and it had this science and tech center with like an atomic symbol on it. Oh, and so, yeah, so we, we thought I actually, so what we've ended up finding out was they, they use an atomic symbol as like just a general shorthand for high tech.

Scott 34:30

There's going to be an awesome strategic culture paper written about that one day.

Jeffrey 34:34

Totally. And so, but when we saw the visit, we were like, oh, we want to find this site because it might be nuclear related. And so using our friends at Planet were actually super helpful because he visited while a building was being constructed. And there was like a pretty big gap in the digital globe imagery there. But Planet had an image of like the day he visited or maybe it was like the day before.

And so we were able to using the fact that he had visited a nearby facility the same day. So we knew it had to be somewhere in that area. We were able to find it and geolocate it. And then we saw it. It was like, oh, it makes, you know, tank chassis. Well, that's disappointing. Yeah.

Scott 35:18

Well, maybe not as disappointing as I thought, right? Yeah, maybe we have something... Just wait a little bit for any disappointing military IDs we get.

Jeffrey 35:28

Yeah, that's the wonderful thing about North Korea is that every facility eventually ends up being interesting for some horrible reason.

Scott 35:35

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 35:37

Well, but so this, right, this thing... I mean, so the thing I was going to say is Dave took the pictures of the vintage Soviet tell.

Scott 35:46

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 35:47

And geolocated it to not the place where we saw the first two launches. Right. But another location at Kusong, which it looks like he calls it like a tell proving ground.

Scott 36:00

Yeah.

Jeffrey 36:01

But I wonder if it's just a proving ground for any heavy vehicle.

Scott 36:04

I think it's heavy vehicles. It's been there long enough. It's been there before we think the Tell may have been under construction, so I actually think it's for heavy vehicles. Curtis Melvin and I looked at that a while back when it came online talking about it, and it looks like a vehicle proving ground.

Jeffrey 36:22

So not surprising that with a new vehicle, right, that they would test it there.

Scott 36:26

Yeah, got to prove it somewhere.

Jeffrey 36:28

Yeah, and, you know, so that raises, like, all kinds of interesting questions. Like, we'd always assume that whatever was tested now must have been the same thing that got tested near Kusong last October. But there are different spots in Kusong, and so maybe the tell wasn't ready? I don't know.

Scott 36:46

Yeah, I'm not sure what's up with that.

Jeffrey 36:49

But also, you know, we're going to get a, we'll, as soon as we get a new image from Planet, we'll take a look at the near-infrared and see if there are any burn scars. But there really shouldn't be.

Scott 36:59

Yeah, it's cold-launched, which once again...

Jeffrey 37:01

I mean, it's pretty far up there before it lights, yeah.

Scott 37:03

Yeah, I don't expect we'd find much. But if it's snowy enough, we may be able to figure out where it went.

Jeffrey 37:12

Yeah, well, we do have an image that shows that they plowed it.

Scott 37:16

Ah, okay.

Jeffrey 37:17

So that's a pretty good signature that... Well, it's a good signature that they were using it, right? True.

Scott 37:22

Yeah.

Jeffrey 37:23

So anyway, so we know where the launch happened because Schmurler is God.

Scott 37:29

Yeah, he's really good at this.

Jeffrey 37:31

I know.

Scott 37:31

He did this from his cell phone.

Jeffrey 37:33

I know.

Scott 37:34

Presumably in the passenger seat on a car trip back from vacation.

Jeffrey 37:39

Yeah. So there's that. And then there are a number of really interesting things that you've been obsessing about the canister, right? So basically it's a tank body with a canister on top of it, and the canister interested you.

Scott 37:54

Yeah, I'm really... My background's in Chinese and North Korean systems, and I really like cold launch systems. Cold launch systems are sort of the specific subset of missiles I really like. And its canister is Russian as hell. It doesn't look Chinese at all, which is...

Jeffrey 38:11

Sorry, sorry. I'm having this hilarious imaginary moment where, like... Scott gets introduced to someone and like, you both work on missiles. And then Scott's like, no, no, no, no, no. This guy likes hot-launched missiles. I'm a cold-launched solid fuel. It's not even anything alike.

Scott 38:26

Oh, yeah, I can't even talk to these people. The one exception is I love me some DF-5s. There is like three people who care at all about anything I just said. But yeah, it specifically does not look like a Chinese canister. For one really big reason, and that is that there is a climate control tubing system, what appears to be consistent with Russian climate control tubing systems on the side.

Chinese ones don't have that.

Jeffrey 38:58

Well, this is a really good point, because I think. You know, there is this popular idea that the Chinese are really close to the North Koreans, which has some basis, in fact. But North Korea's missile programs are all Soviet in appearance, and the underlying technologies are Soviet, right? So everything from the Scud through the Nodong up to the Taepodong, right, those are Scud engines using kerosene, right?

Based on Soviet Scuds that the Egyptians re-transferred to the North Koreans and the Musudan, up through the KN-08 and, and probably the KN-14, although, although now who knows, you know. Those are Soviet submarine launch ballistic missiles. The technology, I think, leaked in the 90s, and, you know, now, you know, I don't know who's helping them on the solid fuel program, but the First two solid-fueled missiles we saw looked a lot like a Soviet surface-to-air missile and the Soviet SS-21 SRBM.

Scott 40:01

Yeah.

Jeffrey 40:02

So, like, it is totally unsurprising to me that their first indigenous transporter erector launcher, right, they say they made it, looks exactly like an early Soviet TAL, right down to the treads. Yeah. And has a canister that looks like they could have shipped in from Moscow.

Scott 40:18

But it looks very Russian. If you watch missiles often, it looks very Russian. But because of the arc the tech has taken, who are they going to compare it to?

Jeffrey 40:27

Yeah, well, you've got to compare it to the Chinese, right?

Scott 40:30

Yep. It follows a similar technical arc that the JL-1 followed to become the DF-21.

Jeffrey 40:37

So the Chinese did the same thing where they started a solid fuel missile program because they wanted to put it on a submarine. And so they did that while they were doing their liquid fuel programs, except for the solid fuel missile program was slow. And ultimately, they kind of get into the 70s. And Zhang Aiping is like...

Wait a second, can you explain to me again how this submarine and this missile are going to work? Because it's a medium-range ballistic missile. And they're like, okay, well, the submarine is going to get the missiles and the nuclear weapons, and it's going to go out to sea. And it's going to go around Singapore and up into the Persian Gulf.

And from there, it will be able to target Moscow. And Zhang Haiping's like, what the fuck are you talking about? And so the name of that missile was the JL-1, and JL is Julong, or Great Wave.

Scott 41:28

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 41:29

Right. And he says, the great wave must go ashore.

Scott 41:32

That's such a good line.

Jeffrey 41:34

Yeah. Yeah. Which is the DF-21. Yep.

Scott 41:38

So the DF-21 specifically became, I think, the DF-21A and the C and D are like little variants that happened afterwards.

Jeffrey 41:46

Right. But the point is, like, this becomes a workhorse of the rocket force.

Scott 41:52

Oh, yeah. Huge mainstay in pretty solid deployment. Yeah.

Jeffrey 41:56

And they never deploy the JL-1.

Scott 41:59

Right.

Jeffrey 42:00

They only build one submarine, and it basically just sits there.

Scott 42:03

Yeah, it is. And this sort of, once again, foreshadowing an arc we're watching for. It was a testbed submarine. They only made one. It just sits there. And they used it as the basis for next-generation ballistic missile subs.

Jeffrey 42:17

Yeah, so, you know, it wasn't surprising to me at all when, like, the North Koreans tested this that it would come ashore. And it wouldn't at all surprise me if the North Koreans... Lose interest in the submarine program. I'm not predicting that they will because, I, I suspect that right now they plan to do it. But like, it is such a natural thing when you get this nice working medium range solid fuel ballistic missile to be like, you know, yeah, this is way better. Like, this is a lot nicer than a No Dong, like, and, and, you know, so I mean, it has so many, oh, I should say This comparison is not to validate the lunatics who think that the KN-11 is a JL-1.

Scott 43:03

That was one of the points I was trying to make, is that people are going to come out of the woodwork and now say, hey, this is clearly Chinese assistance. It isn't. Probably isn't. Very probably isn't.

Jeffrey 43:15

Now, I mean, the problem is solid fuel missiles all look alike, right? Like they don't have the kind of external signatures that arise from all of the plumbing that a liquid fuel missile has. Like a liquid fuel missile, you can find the inlets and you can find the tank stages or the tank, the weld lines between the tanks.

And so you can recreate the inside of the missile based on structural elements that appear on the outside. But I can't do that with, I mean, other than stages, you can't do that with a solid fuel missile.

Scott 43:45

There are a couple cheats for that. Yeah. But because we've had an issue with obfuscation, I'm actually not going to go into that this episode. But there are some things we can do. There are some things, but they aren't as great as with the liquid fuel. No, and they're not as easy.

Jeffrey 43:59

And so the result is that all solid-fueled submarine-launched ballistic missiles basically look the same to me.

Scott 44:06

Yeah, they look very, very similar. Yeah.

Jeffrey 44:09

The idea that because the can 11 kind of looks like the jail one, like, yeah, but it also looks like some early Polaris versions. And it also looks like one of the early French missiles. And like, that's because that's what they look like.

Scott 44:20

There are certain elements of physics and space that will dictate how these missiles will look.

Jeffrey 44:25

And like all, all of those trophy wives at Mar-a-Lago, who we imagine grieving as their husbands were nuked on the golf course, they all share certain physical characteristics. Doesn't mean they're related, but, Right?

Aaron 44:41

Isn't the big takeaway, though, if I call it Aaron's dictum, it's like what you guys talked about, it's the arc of the program, is that it's a program that they are building towards something, and that the test in and of itself... Should be extremely worrying to people because it's indicative of more progress forward on actual sort of more, I don't want to say more usable missiles, but more survivable missiles.

Scott 45:05

I think more usable actually may be a pretty good.

Aaron 45:07

Yeah.

Jeffrey 45:08

I mean, they're more usable and more survivable, right? Yeah.

Scott 45:10

It's all the bad things.

Jeffrey 45:12

So, I mean, I kind of got a kick. I don't know about you. Like, I really liked that Fitzpatrick and Elliman piece saying like, oh, the scud hunt was really hard, but you can't. From that conclude that hunting North Korean ICBMs would be equally hard because they're different right like and one of the things they pointed out was they're only like I forget now 700 kilometers of paved road in the country yeah well you know who may have noticed that there were only 700 kilometers of paved roads The guys who put the missile on the tank that can go off-road now.

Right, you put it on tracks.

Scott 45:46

I'll be really interested to see if we ever see regular support equipment for it, because I really want to know what a support vehicle for a tank is.

Jeffrey 45:56

Oh, well, I mean, I think we have Soviet ones we can look at. There are a bunch of videos of the Soviet ones running around.

Scott 46:01

Yeah. I'm on signature hunt this week.

Jeffrey 46:05

So, I mean, the thing that I took away from this, right, is that the North Koreans have got this missile, which is easier to fire. Yep. Has a way... So, shorter to fire, right? So, you have less time to find it. It has a far smaller support tail. So, you have less time to find something that's harder to find.

Scott 46:26

Yep.

Jeffrey 46:26

And then for this particular missile... It has the capacity to go off-road, so you've got to find it on some heavily forested dirt road. In mountains. Outside of some jerk water like Kusong. That strikes me as being roughly comparable in very different ways to the challenges associated with the scud hunt, right?

Scott 46:56

Yeah, the Scuds were in open desert, but had, well, I guess that's the thing, is they were in relatively, not always, but relatively open desert.

Jeffrey 47:04

Yeah, which was good and bad, right? It was bad because you'd think you'd be able to see them, or good from our perspective, bad from theirs. You'd think you'd be able to see it, but bad from our perspective and good from theirs is there's a lot of frickin' desert.

Scott 47:17

Yeah. North Korea may be smaller, but it's not like you can shine a radar through a mountain.

Jeffrey 47:23

Yeah.

Scott 47:23

And they've got a lot of valleys to pick from.

Jeffrey 47:26

So this strikes me as being something that will be really hard to catch preemptively.

Scott 47:31

Yeah. And if they follow, there's a Chinese basing mode that essentially allows for little culverts and caves to sort of have support equipment in them. So it's not even necessary that you'd be seeing a convoy. You may just see a guy kind of disappear and get joined with his friends at the last minute.

Jeffrey 47:51

Well, and, you know, I mean, I hate to be, like, the bearer of bad news, but, like, now... That ship sailed an hour ago. Like, not only did I tell you they were going to, like, shift to solid fuel, which they did, and not only did I tell you that they would, you know, put those solid fuel missiles on vehicles, are you certain that they're not going to put one of these suckers on a rail car?

Scott 48:14

Uh-oh. Don't say that on the internet.

Aaron 48:23

Listen to you guys talk. It's hilarious.

Scott 48:26

Well, you know what they're going to do with it is they're going to dig a silo and they're going to fill it with sand that will spontaneously liquefy.

Jeffrey 48:36

No, no. They're going to get a ground effect machine.

Scott 48:42

To go in all the salt flats.

Jeffrey 48:44

Yes, that's right.

Scott 48:46

No, I mean, I just, you know, it's solid fueled.

Jeffrey 48:49

It would be lovely in a rail car. Yeah. Maybe they won't necessarily do that, but the point is this is a really flexible system.

Scott 48:59

And if they were really looking to just upset the United States, all they'd have to do is build one or two rail cars, even if they didn't use them.

Jeffrey 49:05

Oh, I would absolutely build one or two rail cars.

Scott 49:08

Yeah.

Jeffrey 49:08

But then, you know, this replicates my absurd belief that not only that I would like... Militaries always insist on having these standard launch units with very predictable spans of control. Yeah. So there's a reason that different kinds of units, you get them in sets of 6 or 12 or 24 or 16 or these kinds of things where you can replicate the number of launchers based on the structure coming from the top down.

Scott 49:42

Right.

Jeffrey 49:43

I would do odd numbers because if you come out and say, oh, we have six launchers, an analyst is going to be like, okay, six launchers, right. That's a reasonable launch element. I'm guessing it's two sets of three or whatever. But if you come out with a weird number, like a prime number, like 13... People are going to be like, there really should be 16 of these things, and I don't know where the third one is.

Or the last three are.

Scott 50:13

Or they should do the college student prank. They should start serializing. Keep all the serial numbers on your parade missiles consistent, but just make them like 30 numbers between each one.

Jeffrey 50:24

Yeah, absolutely. Right. So, I mean, I just think hunting for this stuff is going to be a total, total, total show. I developing signatures on these things are going to be pretty interesting. That's that's that's for sure. So, I mean, I don't know. I think I think the thing I take away is is, you know, it's my I told you so that like people were super worked up about that liquid fuel space program that was based on kerosene.

And it has gotten so much worse, and if we do nothing, it is going to get so much worse, and they are going to build a solid fueled ICBM someday. Yeah, like, they're going to do that, and like, all the patting them on the head in the world is not going to change the fact they're going to do that. Yeah.

So we should try to persuade them not to do that. That would be my advice would be like maybe we should accept that they're going to have some nuclear weapons and we should try to keep them at their current number. You know who used to make this point? Tom Schelling. The late Tom Schelling, before he died, he used to get so annoyed in these conversations.

He was always trying to rope me into it. I never wanted to do it. He was like, we're not going to stop them. We need to like, I don't know, maybe work through the French or maybe the Chinese to try to teach them how to responsibly deploy a nuclear force. And I was like, Tom, I can't like I'm not writing that article.

And he's like, you know, they're going to do it. It's like, OK, I know they're going to do it.

Aaron 51:52

And you are right. But I am not going to write that article.

Jeffrey 51:55

Anyway, so, you know, the thing I take away from this is the North Koreans are moving toward a really threatening force. Like, it's a real thing. It is mobile launchers with solid fuel ballistic missiles that work, that can go off-road. Like, it's maybe a little too early to panic, but, like, this is not heading in a good direction.

Right.

Aaron 52:19

Let me jump in here, because we got detractive in the Mar-a-Lago sort of kerfuffle, but I think this will increase impetus, at least the arguments, for regional and mystical events. And we didn't talk about intercepts, how likely it is, how this creates difficulties, stuff like that. Oh.

Jeffrey 52:36

I know it's long.

Aaron 52:37

We've got to be quick.

Jeffrey 52:38

No, no, but I think it's super straightforward, right? Like, there are a bunch of things. Like, one is, this is a thousand... So, you're not going to be able to catch the stuff on the ground. So, there are going to be more missiles coming at you.

Aaron 52:50

Exactly.

Jeffrey 52:51

And the second piece is... You know, a thousand kilometers is a lot, right? And I still think that it's not just the fact that they are using this system with, you know, separating and possibly spin-stabilized warheads to make it harder to intercept. You know, if they move these things closer to the DMZ, they can loft them so that they are coming in at like a really pretty steep angle.

Scott 53:20

Yeah.

Jeffrey 53:22

You know, and, and, and because they're a thousand kilometers, you know, they're going to come in at a pretty high speed and, you know, things like that can handle that speed, but there are other missile defenses that will, that it will stress.

Scott 53:35

And that can only handle so many incoming. That's right.

Jeffrey 53:39

And they're these, this is cheap. That is not a fancy, you know, that's not like the U S hard mobile launcher, which, you know was figuratively plated in gold. I realize I have to distinguish that since we talked about one that was literally plating things in gold. But that's cheap. I don't think these missiles are going to run them all that much.

So it wouldn't be that big of a deal for them to build a bunch. Right.

Scott 54:08

Yeah, and they probably will. I mean, we're going to have to look at this. I mean, there's going to be a missile defense angle where now people are going to be looking at the spread and the probabilities and whatnot. And there may now have to be an increasing set of literature and policy to examine what does deterrence and arms control look like in an extended, like a more extended situation in which the U.S. and ROK may actually be deterred by North Korea.

Yeah.

Aaron 54:38

And with third party, it's not just binary. It's not binary. China.

Jeffrey 54:43

Yeah, if I can just put one more marker down.

Scott 54:45

Yeah.

Jeffrey 54:45

Radar blackout attacks.

Scott 54:48

Oh, man, we need to have an episode entirely about attack strategies.

Jeffrey 54:56

I mean, I'm just saying, if you sit me down and we're going to play Missile Command on the Korean Peninsula, I would much prefer to be the attacker.

Scott 55:05

But as soon as you say Missile Blackout Strategies, which for the listener, radar... That person is just terrified right now. Well, yeah. Listeners, a radar blackout strategy is you can, certain kinds of radars can be blinded by having a large nuclear weapon detonated within their search volume. Because instead of seeing a small point of light incoming, they see an enormous fireball.

Maybe not fireball, it's in space.

Jeffrey 55:30

Not a fireball, but nonetheless, you do get a blackout effect and you've got a couple of seconds to fly any damn thing you want through it.

Scott 55:36

Well, you also start reaching into a previous tinfoil hat zone because as soon as radar blackouts become realistic, the next step in that is looking at EMPs.

Aaron 55:45

Don't start with EMPs with our current White House. Wait, wait, wait.

Scott 55:50

Can you hear me open the drawer? How are you drinking?

Jeffrey 55:53

I got my tinfoil hat right here.

Scott 55:55

Oh, that's what I meant.

Aaron 55:58

Even my son's yelling about it in the background.

Jeffrey 55:59

Yeah, it's... Ollie, you know the threat of EMP, don't you? Yes.

Aaron 56:08

Oh, my God.

Jeffrey 56:10

So the point is, this is a serious development. We're not ending on a happy note today. Hey, Ollie, earmuffs.

Aaron 56:22

We are so f***ed. You didn't hear that.

Jeffrey 56:26

You didn't earmuff him? It was your job, dad. I said earmuffs very clearly and you needed to like shut it down.

Scott 56:40

Hey, guys, this has been pretty good. Oh, yeah. I hope we did not bore listeners with God technique, like not even technical tangent, just long porn tangents. Hopefully that's why they're here.

Jeffrey 56:50

Great. Well, if you enjoyed listening to the podcast, leave us a review at iTunes. It's really important to get us up the charts and get the word about the podcast out. If you enjoyed the podcast as much as Ali did, consider supporting us through Patreon for a mere $3. Three simoleons a month. you can have access to our Slack channel, which is like exactly a thousand times wonkier than what we just inflicted upon you. So, as always, just started having our first listeners generating their own radar graphs and re-entry velocity estimations. If I remember correctly, it's starting to be a self-perpetuating system.

Yeah, that's awesome. I'm probably going to hop on the Slack channel right now. Well, anyway, thanks for listening.

Aaron 57:34

Ollie, can you say bye-bye? Bye-bye.