THE GREENER BEE

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

You are listening to the Arms Control Wong Podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wong blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Scott LaFoy 0:21

And I'm Scott LaFoy, imagery analyst and master's candidate at the Georgetown University Center for Security Studies. Scott, you're sitting in for Aaron. I am. He's out today. I believe he's traveling again.

Jeffrey 0:32

He is peripatetic, that Aaron Stein. But I'm happy to have you back because I want to talk about Green Bee. Sequel to our popular episode about Taiwan's mysterious Lancer-like missile. Oh. The puns are flying fast and furious. For listeners who are just checking in, Scott and I have long been interested in Taiwan's ballistic missile program. Taiwan had a ballistic missile program in the 1970s and 80s.

There are a lot of hilarious stories about that program and particularly Taiwan's attempts to acquire technology for it. It actually culminated in the Taiwanese showing off one of these missiles in a parade and The U.S. got real annoyed. The Taiwanese never showed off the missile again. And we think eventually that program ended and gave way to a cruise missile program.

But it is this enduring mystery because you will see references to these two Taiwanese missiles, the Green Bee and the Sky Horse, get referenced all the time. And they're never... Until now, was a proper accounting of just what the hell these damn things were.

Scott 1:37

Indeed. One of my favorite little strange accounts of the Skyhorse, to just once again show how bad the data is on that, is a book that specifically refers to the Skyhorse as being discontinued in 1981 and again in 1989. Which either indicates the data's bad, or you're doing discontinuing your program really wrong. That's called clandestine continuation. That's not discontinued.

Jeffrey 2:02

Right. So we had a very successful podcast that we called Green Bee, which was the name of the youngest, or the first, rather, of the Taiwanese missiles, which we loved, or at least I loved. I don't know if you loved it, Scott, but I loved the fact that the Taiwanese named one of their missiles the Green Bee after a Bruce Lee television show.

Scott 2:25

Infinitely funny to me especially because it actually matches their at the time naming convention for their other missiles like their anti-ships and cruise missiles are like drone bees and worker bees but it still works it is the same name as the TV show I

Jeffrey 2:39

Well, I mean, one of the Taiwanese historical sources that we had said that the overall program initially was called Green Bee, and in part that that was an inside joke about boredom, that the Chunshan Institute, where all this work was done, was initially out in the middle of nowhere, and there was no nightlife. There was nothing to do.

And so they would apparently sit in their rooms and watch TV, which, you know, I don't know, man. Happy missileers make for happy missiles, I think. But one of the things that I really thought was interesting is for many, many, many years after the Taiwanese showed off their short-range ballistic missile, which was called Green Bee, everyone I know said it looked like a U.S. Lance missile.

Scott 3:26

And it's really emphasized in the literature. It's hard to see the Green Bee mentioned without saying the Green Bee, which looked surprisingly like the U.S. Lance.

Jeffrey 3:35

But we had our doubts about this because the Taiwanese were working on an extended range version, which they called the Skyhorse. And we knew that most of their research was on solid propellants, not liquid, like the Lance used.

Scott 3:51

That's right.

Jeffrey 3:52

And so we had this enduring mystery of what was the source of the foreign technology? What was the underlying technological orientation of the program? And how is it... That the liquid-fueled Lance copy was supposed to give way to a longer-range solid-fueled missile. These were all mysteries until we solved it.

Scott 4:15

And we've got a bunch of declassified documents that make it really, really clear that at least the appellation of it being a Lance look-alike is actually wrong. It is a look-alike, but it's not a Lance.

Jeffrey 4:29

Yeah, so if you're going to listen to this podcast, we'll just give you the mystery up front, should we? This isn't like cereal or anything, right?

Scott 4:38

Actually, this is the first in a 24-part series. Slowly revealing.

Jeffrey 4:45

35-minute episodes on questions about fuel grains. So it turns out the Green Bee and the Sky Horse were variants of Israel's Jericho missile, which I think is pretty freaking cool.

Scott 5:01

We don't have a document that explicitly says those words, unfortunately, but we have a lot of the tangential data that would point to that.

Jeffrey 5:11

I would say it's more than tangential data.

Scott 5:13

More than tangential?

Jeffrey 5:15

Yeah, well, we'll walk through it, but I think if it's not said so explicitly in the parts of the documents that are declassified, I think it's because it's obvious to the people who are writing it.

Scott 5:27

We also should point out that in the previous episode, we did discuss its landslide capabilities, and this also episode is not only a sequel and a follow-up, but sort of a correction to some of the research that was going on then that new research has come to light.

Jeffrey 5:40

Well, yeah, so the thing to start by saying is when the lance was paraded, every single person who looked at it... Ha! I just did it. When the green bee was paraded, every single person who looked at it said, it looks like a lance missile.

Scott 5:54

Yep, and it got me too. Like, I watched that video, and that was more or less my conclusion. Looks a lot like a lance.

Jeffrey 6:00

Well, and there are even some... I hesitate to call them official documents, but many allegedly reliable... Sources, including an open source paper prepared for the, at the time, I guess, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. It was open source and it was through a contractor, but it recycled this claim that the Green Bee was Lance. And so, you know, I had never seen reasons to doubt that.

But it was a little bit of a mystery because once we started looking at the declassified documents, This simple idea that the missile that the Taiwanese paraded was a copy of the U.S. Lance that they had acquired from the Israelis, it just sat really poorly because we knew everything else about the Taiwanese missile program was a solid propellant missile.

And we knew that the follow-on missile was supposed to be a solid propellant missile. And it just made no sense for the Taiwanese to invest in a weird one-off system that they couldn't produce or maintain.

Scott 7:09

Exactly. A liquid system, you could pull the guidance off of it and aerodynamic data, but a huge part of the research is going into solid propellant fuels, and you're not going to get any of that from the Lance. You're not going to learn how you actually make an efficient missile, let alone a longer-range missile from it. It doesn't make sense as a testbed, really.

Jeffrey 7:29

So, I mean, for me, one of the first things I think to talk about is how much information there is both on the declassified data side, but I think also from the Taiwanese side about the solid propellant infrastructure. So, for example, we know where the plant that made the solid propellant was located, and we know that both because there are declassified documents describing it, but also because they had a giant explosion that was pretty hard to hide.

So I guess on the slack channel I can I can post the lat long although I put it out on Twitter that was a while ago though I think yeah so do you want to talk about the Taishu solid propellant production plant sure let's talk about Taishu a little bit oh no I was trying to make you do it

Scott 8:13

Oh, yeah, well, my knowledge of Tashu is fairly limited to what I've pulled from Crest. I'm doing a large-scale study right now on solid propellant plants abroad, and Tashu is actually three more locations down my list. But Tashu existed at least since 1981. Which has been upgraded since at least 1981. I don't know when it actually starts and was listed as a composite propellant line for 1981, but by 1983 was being expanded into new lines and was listed, believed by the CIA to be producing Solid propellant motors for the Drone B cruise missile, which they list as a modification of the Israeli Gabriel.

The Green Bee missile, which is our interesting one. And the Kung Wu, which they said is an anti-tank missile based on the Soviet Sager. So all these were made in the same plant. It was Tashu. And more specifically, it means, of course, the Green Bee is solid propellant.

Jeffrey 9:16

Yeah, and I think one of the things that... Really struck me about geolocating the plant. I don't know. I don't know about you, but I like to see these things even if I don't necessarily immediately derive any information. Just seeing the size and the layout kind of helps me think through things. Right. The geolocation offered in the declassified documents is terrible.

Scott 9:41

Oh, yeah.

Jeffrey 9:42

And I can't tell how much of that is just variations in geocoordinate systems and just the fact that geo-reference data in the 1970s and 80s sucked. Yeah.

Scott 9:57

And sometimes because, like, pictures were frequently, depending on what era you get them, pictures were part of a physical set. I've always sort of assumed that some of the coordinates line up with a set, and then it would be very, like, clearly denoted on, like, a specific roll or bucket or set. If we have folks who worked with imagery in that era and can actually give us a hint, drop us a line.

We'd love to know.

Jeffrey 10:20

Yeah, your folkways fascinate us because we've got it easy. So yeah, I just took the lat long from the declassified document, plugged it in, and ended up in the middle of nowhere.

Scott 10:31

Yeah, I believe that's basically an agricultural valley.

Jeffrey 10:36

Yeah. And so then I looked around. I mean, a couple of kilometers away, I found a pretty decent candidate for the facility. And then I feel bad saying, like, happy coincidence, but it turns out maybe about 10 years ago it exploded. Oh, yeah. Which was terrible. There was a horrible accident. And, you know, some people were killed, which is very sad.

But from an OSINT perspective, a disaster like that is really valuable because there are pictures. Right. And so we got some place data that was very helpful to kind of confirm that I was in about the right spot. And then in the aftermath, the Taiwanese released one picture from the parking lot.

Scott 11:30

Just one. Was it a particularly information-dense picture, or is it just a parking lot? Well, it's got a building, and it turns out it's got a covered parking structure.

Jeffrey 11:39

Oh. And so, obviously, the building was pretty distinct, and its relation to the covered parking structure was very straightforward, and voila, we made the plan. And as far as I can tell, it's still where they make solid propellant for various things that they do make, although not surface-to-surface ballistic missiles. So that's mystery solved number one that... You know, I would see these references in certain documents.

The Office of Technology Assessment got it right. And the hacks that Bimto contracted with got it wrong. Shock of all shocks. The OTA had gone out of its way to say that the Taiwanese missile program was solid fuel based. And just seeing the plant and identifying the plant and seeing its scale and then looking at the rest of these historical documents, you know, that's...

Like, that's right. So we definitely know that the Taiwanese missile program is solid-fueled. And so if we're looking at these two missiles and what their relationship is to one another, the Green Bee and the Sky Horse, we know the Sky Horse is going to be solid-fueled. And we now strongly suspect that the Green Bee must be solid-fueled, both because the document says that it's solid-fueled, but also that, or at least that the plant, right, its fuel is produced at the plant.

Scott 13:00

Is that the right way to say that? Yeah, I think specifically they actually make the motors there. So it's a propellant and a motor plant.

Jeffrey 13:08

So based on the plant, we're pretty sure the green bee is solid fuel, which raises this really interesting question of why does it look so much like the lance? And this is what I love.

Scott 13:19

Yeah, so this is a very fun find, so I think you should walk us through it. This is your find.

Jeffrey 13:25

Okay, so this part of the story runs through Iran. So in the... 1970s Iran was ruled by a Shah. It was not the Islamic Republic. That's right. And the Shah was pretty friendly with the Israelis. That's correct. And the Shah really liked Israeli weapons.

Scott 13:50

And American weapons and any weapons he could get his hands on. He was a very armament-heavy investor.

Jeffrey 13:57

And we have, thanks both to the Iranians who sacked the U.S. Embassy and the State Department through the declassification process, a series of documents that describe Israel's negotiation with the Shah to sell Iran ballistic missiles.

Scott 14:17

That's right. Very limited ballistic missiles, though, but ballistic missiles.

Jeffrey 14:20

And so Israel's ballistic missile is the Jericho, right? We've got a couple of variants of that missile. I have one more than I actually knew about. People usually know about the Jericho and the Jericho II. There are rumors in recent years that there's Jericho III. This is 1970s, though, so really all the Israelis have is the Jericho.

Which they have basically imported from France, but then reverse engineered and made their own. The French were assisting them in developing the missile. They cut them off. But they'd already sent the Israelis some missiles, and so the Israelis finished it. As the Israelis were moving to develop the longer-range Jericho II, which people in the space community know as the Shavit space launcher, they needed money because developing missiles is really expensive.

And they sold this capability to South Africa.

Scott 15:14

Mm-hmm. Which I think served as the, is this what served as the basis of the RSA space rockets?

Jeffrey 15:20

Yes. And so that was nice because the South Africans had to have a lovely test site that the Israelis could use. But again, there's money. And if you're developing a missile, it's expensive. And they wanted further assistance to offset the cost of developing the Jericho II. And so they went to the Iranians. And what I find really interesting about all these documents is the Israelis and the Iranians are eager to do this deal, but they're also eager for the United States to be okay with it.

And so there are a ton of cables where the U.S. is talking to the Iranians and the U.S. is talking to the Israelis, and they're not doing it in secret at all. You know, they are keeping the United States, like, totally apprised of this deal just to make sure nobody in Washington is going to get their nose bent out of joint when Jericho starts showing up in Iran.

But there's one cable that really catches my attention. Because obviously I was looking at these thinking, look, the Israelis sold these capabilities to the South Africans and they were willing to sell them to the Iranians. And, you know, the motive here is really about getting money to support the program. It would be natural to assume that they would want to sell them to the Taiwanese.

Because that solves their money problem just as well, right?

Scott 16:39

And it moves along an armament axis that already existed. Israel and Taiwan already had relationships on, if I remember correctly, cruise and anti-ship missile systems, as well as smaller arms. And that anti-tank missile.

Jeffrey 16:54

Yeah. Right. Is a three country development. So so knowing about both of that relationship at the time, Israel, South Africa and Taiwan were known as pariahs. Right. Knowing that about that political relationship, but then also understanding the Israeli motivation, right, which is to offset the cost of developing the Jericho, too. It seems totally natural that they would turn to the Taiwanese once the both, I think, in addition to the Iranians and certainly even more so after the Iranians drop out.

But there is this cable and it is the it's for me, it was the one that really unlocked it because the Israeli defense minister briefs someone at the State Department about what systems are on offer to the Iranians. And they describe one, which is actually a smaller version of the Jericho. It's a one-stage missile, and they describe it as a poor man's lance.

Scott 17:53

100 to 150 kilometer range.

Jeffrey 17:56

And furthermore, they say that it'll be available for delivery. It's going into the Israeli force sort of presently, and will be available for delivery to the Iranians around 1981.

Scott 18:10

Right, within four years of the date of the document, which is, I think, 1970...

Jeffrey 18:15

I'm pretty sure it's 77.

Scott 18:16

You're correct, it's 1977. Ready for delivery within four years. And when does that missile appear in Taiwan at that parade?

Jeffrey 18:25

1981. Right. Now, Scott, you were pointing out that the Taiwanese government announced that it had tested the Green Bee earlier than that.

Scott 18:39

Yes, there is another State Department cable that's been declassified that says earlier this year, this year being 1979, that a Qingfeng was tested, which they listed as a surface-to-surface tactical missile with a range of 110 kilometers.

Jeffrey 18:58

Yeah, so it turns out that actually got reported in the South China Morning Post in 1979. Really? Yeah, there's a report from the Taiwanese legislative body, the Legislative Yuan. And I haven't ever been able to get a copy of that report, or I haven't yet been able to get a copy of that report. But it was summarized in AFP.

And then I found it through the South China Morning Post, which picked up the AFP story, that said that Taiwan is developing two missiles, the Green Bee surface-to-surface missile and the Kunwu God of Fire anti-tank missile. Right. And that those had been tested in 1978.

Scott 19:38

Oh, interesting.

Jeffrey 19:41

Yeah. Now, I don't know if that means they actually tested them.

Scott 19:45

Yeah, this goes back into sort of our, like... Wonk jargon issue. The word test can be a lot of different things. It doesn't necessarily mean it's a flight-tested missile, even though colloquially that's how we usually use it. That could mean something like a horizontal static test or just a rocket motor test.

Jeffrey 20:05

Well, and also one thing I was thinking about was in the Iranian documents, remember the Iranians came over, I guess General Tufanian got to watch a Jericho launch out of Israel. Ooh, okay. So I wonder if the Taiwanese aren't... I mean, maybe the Taiwanese had their own version to test, but I wonder if it was an Israeli test.

Scott 20:31

Ah, well, that would be so unusual to hear of an Israeli test performed in another country to hide strategic systems development. Right. I don't know when they would have done that.

Jeffrey 20:43

Right. So, you know, like, I don't know. It's still a little bit of a mystery to me. Oh, yes. But I think once I read that cable, knowing that there is an Israeli variant of the Jericho called the Poor Man's Lance... That is solid-fueled and fits the description of the green bee perfectly. And the range profile specifically.

Right. And then, furthermore, seeing some of the documents we'll talk about in a second, that's what we're looking at here. The minute I saw that cable... And I saw, well, I'll say this. We knew, so we, as we discussed in the last podcast, we knew the Israelis were providing assistance to the Taiwanese missile program. Right. Right. The Gabriel anti-ship missile, that is, no one denies that.

Scott 21:37

Yeah, I think that is a fully licensed system transfer. That's not like a clandestine thing. I'm not even sure if back then it was a clandestine thing.

Jeffrey 21:47

No, it was pretty open, and Yitzhak Shakur wrote this amazing article about the history of Israeli... With the Taiwanese armaments industry that's really a sort of account of the individuals who are involved. And, you know, the Taiwanese and the Israelis openly talk about that transfer. Right. And that's the same plant that's making the Green Bee.

Scott 22:17

And specifically at Tashu, Israel is providing technology assistance for the production of solid propellants and solid propellant rocket motors.

Jeffrey 22:27

And so at that moment, or when I saw the reference to a poor man's lance, for me, that was it. I knew, right? Because now the question is, why is this missile misidentified as a lance? And, you know, like, well, why would that happen, right? Why would a solid propellant missile be confused for the Lance? And the answer is because the Israelis were making their own Lance-looking knockoff using the solid propellant Jericho.

Yeah, which... Which they were willing to sell to the Iranians. Yeah, they were willing to sell to a lot of people, apparently. Right, exactly. So it's like, oh, that's what it is. The Green Bee is a mini Jericho. And then you found, I think, the last thing, which is fascinating because I found the same document, but it was redacted differently.

Scott 23:26

Yeah, this goes to one of our favorite things that happens is the same document gets declassified multiple times with differing things that have been unredacted. And we have a document detailing the prospects for arms production and development in the Republic of China. The Taiwanese were explicitly in the market for five systems. Quote, Taiwan is particularly interested in obtaining missiles and or related technologies and is attempting to get the following systems.

The Automat surface-to-surface cruise missile, the Cactus slash Crotail surface-to-air missile, the Roland, the Rapier, the Shafrir, and the Jericho surface-to-surface SRBM produced by Israel. So they are explicitly marked in CIA documentation as in the market for a Jericho.

Jeffrey 24:18

So I think there were two things about this document that were really important, right? One, which closes off a little problem we had and, and something that I thought was very confusing in all of the declassified documents from the 1970s about Taiwanese arms purchases. The State Department, and then I guess really the rest of the U.S. government, adopted this really annoying habit of referring to anti-ship missiles like the Harpoon or the Gabriel or the Automat as long-range missiles.

Scott 24:58

Oh, yes, it's so infuriating. There's even books still that mark the Green Bee explicitly as an anti-ship missile. Right.

Jeffrey 25:07

And so there were lots of lots of times where you would think you've got the smoking gun and then you realize after a second that they're just talking about the Gabriel. And so this is the first time where it says, you know, no idiot, the Jericho.

Scott 25:26

This is sort of like lining up all of the things for our missing variable, plugging it in, and everything now works out. And it makes so much more sense now.

Jeffrey 25:34

And it's not surprising we knew, but it just seems like the declassification has generally been very careful to avoid this.

Scott 25:42

Oh, yes. The early versions of this document that says that they are in the market for Jericho expunges almost all mentions that would even imply Israel was helping with something that could even be used for a ballistic missile program, let alone directly working with Taiwan and Taiwan being in the market for these missiles. They are very careful to expunge that whole relationship.

Jeffrey 26:05

This document solved two problems we had. One problem was that the State Department had this annoying tendency of calling the Harpoon and the Gabriel and the Automat surface-to-surface missiles.

Scott 26:18

Right, because the top of the ocean, it counts as technically a surface.

Jeffrey 26:21

And so there were all these references to Israeli assistance on surface-to-surface missiles to Taiwan. Which at first looked like smoking guns, but then because they're adopting this weird language, you couldn't tell. Often they were talking about Harpoon and Gabriel.

Scott 26:39

Right, especially because there was a very big, I don't know about controversy, but kerfluffle over Taiwanese acquisitions of harpoons because they were very, very, very insistent on acquiring the harpoon to the point of changing other acquisition relationships to line that up. So it comes up a lot in 1970s documents.

Jeffrey 27:00

Right, so it's a really big, a really... I would say that the question whether or not the United States is going to sell Harpoon or broker an Israeli sale of Gabriel instead is kind of the central policy question that faces the United States as it's looking to recognize the government in Beijing as the legitimate government of China and basically relegate the Taiwanese to their new status.

But this was a problem in the documents where Sometimes there were references to surface-to-surface missiles, and you just couldn't tell if they were anti-ship missiles or if we were finally talking about the Green Bee. Right. And so here is a cable that says Jericho. So it leaves no doubt about the specific surface-to-surface missile in question. But then the second thing is the documents are so carefully redacted to hide this.

And I think it's almost certain that we knew, right? Because so much of this debate about Harpoon is part of this broader debate about... How do we get the Taiwanese the weapons they need to defend themselves without making the Chinese really mad? So in some cases, we're going to just sell the stuff to the Taiwanese and deal with the angry Chinese.

But in other cases, we're going to go find other people to make those sales. And while I'm not sure maybe we did or didn't broker this, given the way that the Israelis treated that sale to the Iranians, I just don't think the Israelis were doing it in secret.

Scott 28:35

Yeah, it seems like it'd be something hard judging by the relationship with other deals that we would just not know about it.

Jeffrey 28:43

Yeah, I mean, not that the Israelis wouldn't do something in secret if they thought it was in their interest, but you can see really clearly in terms of the way that they're making decisions about the Iranians. Like, yes, they want the money for the Jericho 2 program, but they're not willing to spoil relations with the United States over it.

And so there's this long discussion about how, I guess it's not that long, but one of the cables in the Iran deal, the Israelis say, look, we can provide this technology to the Iranians without transferring any U.S. technology. But even if we do that, first of all, it would be better if we included some of the U.S. technology we had.

But even if we were to go with a completely walled-off system, we would still want your approval.

Scott 29:36

Yeah.

Jeffrey 29:37

Because it's just not enough money, right, to deal with this blowback. I just cannot imagine in a situation where the United States is actively encouraging the Israelis to fill in the gaps that we are leaving, And in which the Israelis are already in this other context incredibly sensitive to making sure that we're cool with what's about to get sold, that they aren't turning right around and saying like, okay, well, so here is the menu for Taiwan.

Scott 30:06

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 30:08

Which, you know, to me now this document sort of unlocks that because it's clear we know that the Israelis are offering the Jericho to the Taiwanese. And the only reason we don't see it in most of the declassified documents is that the old retirees they have hired to process the FOIA requests have been really careful.

Scott 30:28

Until now. And I think the existence of this sort of thrice... Oh, this sounds like a North Korean declassification process. This thrice-redacted document now. Now that we have three versions of it declassified in three different ways, I'd be curious if we can actually start poking around and get FOIAs on more of them and see if we can start unlocking Skyhorse next.

Well, so, I think I'm done. I think I know.

Jeffrey 30:54

I think Skyhorse is just a Jericho.

Scott 30:56

Just like a Jericho 1.5?

Jeffrey 30:58

Well, I mean, you get two different ranges for the Sky Horse. Right. Cited in Taiwanese documents.

Scott 31:13

That's the 500 and the 850?

Jeffrey 31:16

And sometimes you see 1,000. Okay. So I guess I should say three. But yeah, basically there's a shorter and a longer one, right? Right. And I'm guessing... That that's just a Jericho. That, you know, because the Jericho had a 500 kilometer range.

Scott 31:35

Oh, okay.

Jeffrey 31:37

And so I'm guessing that there was, you know, something like a Jericho and then, I don't know, like a Jericho and an improved Jericho.

Scott 31:50

Right. Probably not a two-stage Jericho 2, because that would be... Real fancy but maybe, maybe, if, maybe, if the Taiwanese had held out long enough, and it is something to note that like the, the Green Bee was supposed to be a stepping stone missile. There's only one document I've seen that ever implies it could be useful operationally. It's entirely, everything else indicates that it is just there to design the second missile.

Jeffrey 32:23

Well, that's exactly right. And that was what triggered my interest in the first place, because when those two statements, this is a stepping stone toward the Sky Horse, and it is a knockoff of the Lance. Those two statements don't match. Right. You know, at that point, you're just telling me, like, this is a square circle.

Scott 32:45

You can't have this strange, storable liquid propellant system be the predecessor of the solid propellant system. That's not an efficient technique.

Jeffrey 32:52

Unless you are literally going to put it on the floor, and the technician is going to stand on it to reach something higher up on the Skyhorse. LAUGHTER

Scott 33:02

Taiwan has a very expensive acquisition program for literal stepping stones.

Jeffrey 33:07

So, you know, yeah, it had to be the case that the green bee resembled the sky horse. And so, obviously, the fact that it is this Jericho, this reduced-size Jericho, that the Israelis are openly calling a poor man's lance... That's the answer, right? And so then that, to me, makes the Sky Horse just a Jericho.

Scott 33:40

And if it's not just a Jericho, it's a Jericho alike. It's something in the same neighborhood as a Jericho. Right.

Jeffrey 33:47

And it, you know, I mean, I think the Jericho 2 was like 1,500 kilometers. So, you know, it's possible that... You know, the Sky Horse would have been a Jericho 2 and not a Jericho. I mean, I know that that's what the... I'm pretty sure that's what the South Africans were getting. So, you know, kind of regardless of whether the Sky Horse would have been the Jericho 1 or 2 is kind of less important than the fact that we now fully understand this relationship.

I think for the first time, we get that... The Green Bee was this poor man's lance, which is really just a simplified Jericho. And then the Sky Horse and all of Taiwan's ballistic missile programs that were going to come from that would have been Taiwanese variants of the Jericho in the same way that the South African missile program were going to be variants of the Jericho.

Scott 34:45

Exactly. And it makes perfect sense. Would you like one other fun piece of data that sort of lines up with the Jericho 2 argument?

Jeffrey 34:52

Sure, because then I'm going to share sort of why we give crap about this. But go ahead.

Scott 34:59

Okay. 1980... Is it 87 or 89? Taiwan starts performing studies about launching a carrier rocket industry. About the same time that the Skyhorse was going to be cancelled a second time, the Taiwanese carrier rocket study fails. So the Taiwanese decision to not build space launchers and the Taiwanese decision to not build the Skyhorse, the second decision, happen very, very close to each other.

And that is just a circumstantial piece of evidence, but it's one I kind of have been trying to see if I can find more information on. So I take away a couple of big things from this.

Jeffrey 35:41

One is that the United States... Knew very well that Taiwan was developing long-range ballistic missiles and was doing so with the active cooperation of the Israelis.

Scott 35:53

Right.

Jeffrey 35:55

And I think it is interesting that the open-source community Didn't really figure that out at the time. And I think that's super interesting that people kept their mouths shut. There's only one article by this guy, Robert Harkavy, who writes about proliferation among the pariahs. And he says in this article, I'll never forget it. He says it like three or four times.

A Jericho would make perfect sense for the Taiwanese.

Scott 36:23

Let me bold this a bit more and underline it for y'all.

Jeffrey 36:27

But he never says the Israelis are selling the Jericho to the Taiwanese. He just keeps saying it as like, this is so obvious, right?

Scott 36:38

It's like U.S. officials who for years have been like, we can neither confirm nor deny anything about Israel's nuclear weapons program, but it would make so much sense for them to just have one, you know?

Jeffrey 36:49

He's still around, by the way, as far as I know. Although I think he's probably getting up there. But I really... One of my questions that I think eventually I've got to follow up on is... Did he know and just didn't feel like saying or didn't feel like he could say? Or is it just sort of the process we went through, which is, boy, it seems really obvious that this would be happening.

And I don't see any evidence of it, but, you know, I... You know, so I wouldn't be shocked. And so I don't know if he was just guessing or if he knew, but it's really the only article in the open literature I found that took this possibility seriously. And so people studying missile proliferation in the 1980s Had this missile proliferation network, right?

The Israelis had gotten the Jericho from the French, and they had made it their own, and they were selling it to South Africans, and they wanted to sell it to the Iranians before that revolution, and they were selling it to the Taiwanese, and that was a thing that went basically undocumented in the literature. And so I think that's interesting.

But also, like, now I understand why the Taiwanese missile program didn't succeed. I mean, we really do have a serious cutoff lever.

Scott 38:11

Well, if you'd like a really good extra cutoff lever and a tantalizing piece of data from the declassified, do you see what the U.S. said one of their most important obstacles to creating larger diameter solid propellant motors was?

Jeffrey 38:25

No.

Scott 38:26

A mixing machine that they would likely have to acquire from the United States. Indicating that maybe the U.S. actually had a literal hard lever on it in that the Taiwanese probably would have hit up the U.S. The U.S. would have called France every day for the next five years and told them to cool it and keep it to themselves.

Jeffrey 38:48

I think of my friend Kimmy Grand, who's now at NATO. But worked for the French government. I imagine myself and Camille in that situation. I'm just calling him every day. I'm like, ah, Bush, Camille, how are you?

Scott 39:00

Anyone try to buy large diameter mixers today?

Jeffrey 39:03

Anyone take you for Mapo Tofu this week?

Scott 39:07

Don't do the bubble tea. It's a trap. Yeah, that's right. But in one of the declassified documents we're looking at right now, it is listed that the Green Bee was initiated, or the Green Bee follow-on was initiated in 1981, and that it would be a multi-stage Green Bee. Oh. With a range between 700 and 960 kilometers, which puts it a little more towards Jericho territory again.

Jeffrey 39:35

It puts it toward Jericho 2 territory. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, maybe it would have been a two. Fair enough. Well, you've now persuaded me that the green bee was this poor man's lance, and the sky horse in its 500 kilometer versions was probably envisioned as a Jericho, and the sky horse in its longer range variants was probably a not very impressive Jericho, too.

Scott 40:08

It's interesting to see that the French may have accidentally touched off a Jericho arc, kind of similar to the Scud proliferation arc we see in a lot of countries.

Jeffrey 40:17

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing that all three of those customers got shut down. But there's no particular reason that that would have happened oh the last thing I take a third thing away from this story we are not sufficiently worried about solid fueled missile proliferation oh I think is this our sixth episode on that now we've got North Korea on the brain We've got this idea that liquid-fueled missiles are all that these countries can do.

And that is because we've watched one particular country saturate the market with liquid-fueled missiles. But we have other cases of solid-fueled missile proliferation. We do. A pretty robust one. And, you know, we have the Argentina-Egypt-Iraq vector story.

Scott 41:17

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 41:18

And now we have the Israel-South Africa-Iran-Taiwan story.

Scott 41:24

God, that's just a weird consortium list.

Jeffrey 41:27

So you say it, but it isn't, right? These are... I mean, we don't use this term pariah anymore because I guess it's got this negative connotation, but in the 1970s and 1980s, yeah, like... Israel, apartheid era South Africa, and Taiwan were countries that had no friends. The United States was really the only friend they had, and we were kind of s*** friends.

Scott 41:52

Yeah, it's almost like states that are excluded from large-scale trade blocs regionally start creating alternative markets.

Jeffrey 42:00

Yeah. So, you know, given that we have now seen two different countries Or co-development efforts or proliferation networks associated with solid fuel missile programs in the 1970s and 80s, we should be cognizant of the fact that that can happen again. And maybe it's the North Koreans this time, because the North Koreans have a solid fuel missile program going like gangbusters.

Scott 42:24

Yep. Well, but the flip side of that is if Condor 2 and if the Jericho networks are the examples for a solid fuel network, we may already know how to shut them down. Well... We just have to ally with the North Koreans.

Jeffrey 42:38

Yeah, that's... Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do think it is really interesting if we look at it, we look at how we shut these networks down. You know, there's a little bit of luck, a little bit of just collateral damage, right? Like Iran is just collateral damage to a whole bunch of other stuff. And a little bit of pressure but we may not have those same levers of pressure and we may not be as lucky and so I'm just I just maybe I'm wrong maybe people do take solid fuel missile proliferation really seriously but my experience has been it was hard to convince people this might happen in the DPRK and now that I've looked at these two networks and I remember how long ago that was And I realize that it probably may well have succeeded.

I just think we're, you know, the TPRK, Iran, or one other country outside of the MTCR figuring this technology out, away from, you know, this new wave of proliferation of more capable ballistic missiles.

Scott 43:42

Not a happy note. Taiwan doesn't have strategic nuclear missiles. Well, happy note.

Jeffrey 43:48

Well, no, no, no, because they they they they to to to replicate the classic arms control wonk podcast habit. No, they did what Dennis Gormley said they would do, which is when that program was shut down, they shifted their efforts over to a long range cruise missile. And Asia is in the midst of a very robust era of cruise missile proliferation.

Scott 44:13

Oh, yes.

Jeffrey 44:14

We have them in South Korea and Taiwan, and I think it is not long before the Japanese join in the fun. Because, you know, who likes to be left out of a party?

Scott 44:24

Oh, yeah, and the Self-Defense Force. The Self-Defense Force could take literally 60 years of U.S. Department of Defense policy in regards to Taiwan, arguing that cruise missiles play a significant role in a hedgehog-style defensive posture. That is a very big thing that the State Department talks about through the 70s. So if the Self-Defense Force wants a defensive missile, cruise missile may be the way to write that off.

Ah... That was not a happy note. Nope. But you know what? You know what is a happy note?

Jeffrey 44:58

What? The fact that our Slack channel is going gangbusters. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what unknown delights await the Arms Control Wonk Patreon subscriber.

Scott 45:15

The Garden of Patreon Delights is rich in its fruit. It is incredibly active right now, partially because there's an incredibly tense potential crisis situation going down on the Korean Peninsula. I don't think it's going to be a crisis. Oh my god, it's so stressful.

Jeffrey 45:33

So they're going to do a parade. It's going to be a missile. You're going to read all about it on the Slack channel. Sorry, go ahead.

Scott 45:39

Yeah, we recorded this before the missile parade. Whoops. Oh, yes. And until then, the Slack channel will be excited with speculation over whether or not that's correct. There's a couple polls going on. We've got not no gambling for real money, but informal bets on what the different test could be. We've got a robust cyber channel with several really legitimate in-industry experts hanging around.

I talk a lot about our Biochem Radiological channel because I don't really understand those very well. We have a lot of very experienced people. And just a lot of smart, active people talking about varying degrees of wonkery. It's a good way for me to accidentally burn a bunch of time. And we put a bunch of declassified documents.

Yesterday I was doing a little bit of work on Soviet solid propellant facilities and putting some of the results of the work in the imagery channel, which I love. The imagery channel is my favorite.

Jeffrey 46:34

Yeah, it's really fun. So if you like the podcast, consider making a donation to us through our Patreon page for... Three dollars a month. You can not only support the podcast you see here or listen to here, but you can also come play with us on the Slack channel. And even if you don't feel like becoming a subscriber, at least think about writing a review for us on iTunes.

One of the ways that iTunes works and helps people find the podcast is through user reviews. And so the more better reviews we get, the more people who are likely to find us, and maybe they'll come over and give us the three bucks that you're too cheap for. Anyway, as always, Scott, thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks, Jeffrey. This has been a lot of fun. I like going through these D class stuff, and thanks for listening.