Transcript
Transcribed automatically: it certainly contains errors. It’s pretty good, just not perfect. We provide it here because, for accessibility, it’s better than nothing.
Aaron Stein
0:00
Hello and welcome to the Arms Control Wonk podcast. My name is Aaron Stein. I'm a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk blog, as well as an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a PhD candidate at King's College.
Jeffrey Lewis
0:13
And I'm Jeffrey Lewis. I'm the director of the East Asian Non-Proliferation Program at the Monterey Institute, the founding publisher of ArmsControlWonk.com, and currently on a semi-vacation in Paris.
Aaron
0:28
We're on the opposite sides of France at the moment. Also on vacation with my mother, visiting nice parts of the east coast of France. So we're on the same time zone this time. Yeah, that's very unusual.
Jeffrey
0:40
There are some workmen trying to fix some things. So hopefully they won't make too much noise. No, it'll add some ambiance to the podcast.
Aaron
0:46
If they do. Anyways, after our last week hiatus, we have more news from the DPRK. So last time we talked about the K835 cruise missile. And we now, North Koreans, have rewarded us with more... Pictures and video. Is there video or mostly pictures of more launches? Artillery, what appear to be two Scud missiles, and artillery units shelling ships and big giant exercises that include hovercrafts.
Jeffrey
1:14
Yeah, it's all pictures so far, but there have been... Three different North Korean news stories replete with pictures showing artillery launches, scud launches, and now pictures of a combined arms exercise using coastal artillery and what look like cruise missiles on ships and then hovercraft bringing North Korean soldiers to storm a beach. Right. It's like the world's coolest video game, a friend of mine said.
Aaron
1:51
Right. As if the video game maybe had a little older technology than perhaps some of the newer ones that are being released. It's retro, Aaron. It's retro. Right. Retro's in. When I understand the U.S. and South Korean large-scale military exercises have just wrapped up, so this is being framed as a response to what was going on between our country and the South Koreans, and maybe a tit-for-tat.
Is that how you interpret it, or are the North Koreans doing something – are they up to something different, I should say?
Jeffrey
2:25
Yeah, well, I was sitting here reviewing Aristotle's four different kinds of causes. Because I think there are different sorts of causes at play. But I think you're right. The most narrow explanation is... Foal Eagle, Key Resolve Foal Eagle, the big U.S. ROK exercise that was held in March and April had a giant bilateral amphibious assault called Double Dragon.
It's a great name. And I guess this is the this is the North Korean analog Double Dragon.
Aaron
3:06
See, we can do this, too. Right. And Double Dragon, we should also point out, I think it's a retro video game. Is it really? I think it is.
Jeffrey
3:14
Oh, wow. Boy, I should have made that into a column, right?
Aaron
3:17
Yeah. That may require some Googling, but off the top of my head, I think I remember playing it when I was younger. But, you know... I think for us wonkers, we actually enjoy the pictures. I always find that there's this perverse thing that comes out of the North Koreans, that the pictures are both amusing because they're so heavily staged, but also because it provides us with...
More information about what it exactly is that they're firing off all the time.
Jeffrey
3:45
Yeah. The first picture was... So the first set of pictures, which were associated with some kind of launch, were in the Rodong Sinmun. And a lot of us were really, really baffled. And actually, it's still kind of a mystery. Because... You know, they released the pictures, and you could see that there was a kind of blurry missile with a really bright plume, a bright and smoky plume, which usually means some kind of solid-fueled missile.
But the question was, is it an artillery piece, like an artillery rocket, or is it something longer range, like a short-range ballistic missile? And the South Koreans just kind of baffled me because they said, oh, well, based on the trajectory, it went 190 kilometers, and we think it's a 300-millimeter artillery piece. Or artillery rocket. And that, I put up a post, like, I don't fully understand how that's possible, because the most likely 300 millimeter artillery of the sort that the Russians make, something called the BM-30, only has like 60 kilometers in range.
And so 190 kilometers would actually be much closer to something like a An SS-21, which is a short-range ballistic missile that the North Koreans have copied from the Russians. And so we've been sort of scratching our heads trying to figure out whether the first test really was an artillery system, as the South Koreans said, or whether it might have been something else.
I should say there are some... There are some. There is basically... One, slightly more than that, but if you're imagining the North Koreans having it, there's one candidate of a Chinese system that's, I think, 302 millimeters that might go that far. But it's really, it's not super clear what they fired, to me at least.
Aaron
5:45
Yeah, it certainly appears to be. One of the things they do in these pictures is that it's never super clear. I mean, sometimes it's always a little difficult to tell exactly what it is that they're firing off.
Jeffrey
5:55
That's the thing about pornography, Aaron. You have to leave a little something to the imagination.
Aaron
5:59
Right, right. Maybe it's more like burlesque. You are in Paris. What I'm curious is, what about the Scud launches? I mean, does the Scud launches tell us anything about what's going on? Or is it more than just flexing their muscles saying, hey, we can still fire off some Scud missiles? And there was also, just to keep going on the sort of the burlesque photo angle we got going on here, some controversy about whether pictures of Kim Jong-un sort of overlooking what appears to be a misty valley and the missiles launching up from it were photoshopped or not.
And what are they trying to tell us, if anything? Or are we reading too much into it, a little too much? Kremlinology, if you catch my drift.
Jeffrey
6:42
I do. So this gets to this interesting question of the different causes. So I think this series of launches are at an initial level understood best as a response to U.S. exercises. Right, I agree. But then there's always a question about the content of them. What do they include and what don't they include and does that tell us anything interesting?
And so one of my colleagues thinks that the reason that you're seeing both artillery launches and ballistic missile launches, if the first one was an artillery launch, Is that a possible explanation, a possible explanation, not necessarily one that I can prove or believe at this point, but something worth considering, is that over the past couple of years, the North Koreans have increased the profile of the Strategic Rocket Forces Command.
Jeffrey
7:40
And there has been some question that had been created out of an old artillery, the Artillery Guidance Bureau, I think. And so there was some question about the relationship of the artillery to the strategic rocket forces. Were they subordinate? Had they lost favor? Were they a competitor that was getting sort of pushed around now that the North Koreans had better missiles?
And so one hypothesis is that if we could understand all of this correctly, that we would be getting some message about the relationship between North Korea's artillery capability, which is in some ways strategic, and its official strategic rocket forces. But what that thing is, is eluding me at the moment.
Aaron
8:33
I'm curious also, just to build on the podcast that we had last time about how the cruise missile force, if it exists, I think we can pretty much say it exists, fits into this. I mean, are they... Lumping in, you know, sort of what, we'll go back to what Dennis Gormley was saying, this ability to perhaps overwhelm potential defenses, missile defenses in the region, by mixing ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, and perhaps now artillery, to overwhelm, you know, defensive forces, if you want to call them, either by the South Koreans, the Japanese, the United States, and how that's fitting into the larger picture that we know about in the DPRK.
Jeffrey
9:12
Well, that was one of the most interesting things that a colleague of mine named Nathan Hunt picked up, which is he looked at all of the pictures that were released with these various exercises. And one of them has a map of South Korea. And it shows all these different missile pathways. Right? Basically, like, it's a map, and remember how the old map of death had the United States with all the lines coming in?
Aaron
9:41
Yeah, and a poor ballistic trajectory.
Jeffrey
9:43
Yeah, so this is a map of South Korea, and it really looks like... Well, it's a map of Korea. But it really looks like one of the trajectories kind of curves in and might be a cruise missile. It's a really blurry map. It's really hard to make out. I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at. I have to be kind of careful in presenting it.
But... There does seem to be this message that's being conveyed about their striking power.
Aaron
10:27
Yeah, and it's this larger thing that's happening in Asia and to some extent in the Middle East, but much more in Asia with China. With China being the best example, I really think it's something new that we have now in arms control, in the stability and instability paradox that was not present in the Cold War. It's that we are having conventionally armed ballistic missiles being paired with conventionally armed cruise missiles in states that also have nuclear weapons.
And if you are sitting in South Korea and you're trying to war plan for what's going on and you see blurry maps of death, how can you be reassured that the North Koreans already A, would not have a nuclear warhead on the front of this missile, other than the fact that you just say that, oh, they wouldn't do that because deterrence theory says they wouldn't.
No, you understand what I'm getting at here. It's that the North Koreans have made noises that they're miniaturizing their nuclear weapons, that they have special devices that we don't quite know about yet. And I think you and other people have written about how that could be a miniaturized warhead for a ballistic missile. And if we have the Koreans leaning...
More heavily on ballistic missiles, does that create a layer of instability that was hitherto not present in the superpower relationship? And am I plugging your book, your Adelphi book, again, without actually having read it?
Jeffrey
11:54
No, but you are plugging my hobby horse on the central problem of nuclear weapons in the 21st century, which is, I probably told you this before, seatbelts. Do you know this about seatbelts? No. So... In the 1960s, when seatbelts were introduced, the universe of Chicago economists who were very market-oriented and hate regulations figured out, or at least endeavored to prove, and there was some evidence to support this, that giving people seatbelts in their cars didn't reduce fatalities.
Because, of course, you could buckle in and drive to the grocery store and enjoy your new level of safety. But some people choose to drive to the grocery store like maniacs so they get there five minutes early. And the idea was it was called risk substitution. And it may not be true with seatbelts. It turns out the evidence on seatbelts is really much more complex and actually not very compelling.
But there's apparently better evidence that that's true with ski helmets. You give somebody a ski helmet, instead of enjoying the slope at a higher level of safety, they basically return to their original level of risk and get more adrenaline. I am – I started off suspicious, but I think I'm close to convincing myself that that's how the Pakistanis and the North Koreans look at nuclear weapons.
We imagine they get them for security reasons like, oh, we face these threats now that we have these nuclear weapons. But just like with ski helmets, they're under no obligation to enjoy the additional security. They can choose to spend it. And I think they've quite rationally chosen to spend it on sticking it to their neighbors. So, right, they have these nuclear weapons.
They have this ability now to launch conventional attacks against South Korea with more or less impunity.
Jeffrey
14:02
And that's a real problem. So what I worry about, and this kind of loops back to where these exercises come in, I think, have you noticed in the last couple of years the South Koreans have shown off their cruise missile and ballistic missile capabilities a lot?
Aaron
14:17
Yeah, we talked about this a little bit last time, like releasing videos putting cruise missiles through the window or saying they could put the cruise missiles through a window of a building that looks a lot like
Jeffrey
14:28
The North Koreans presidential palace, is that what you call it, Sun Palace, right? So I, I think the natural response is to say, if you think you have this nuclear deterrent that allows you to hit us conventionally and we can't do anything because you'll retaliate with nuclear weapons, well, what if we kill Kim Jong-il? Right? If we kill Jong-il, then there's nobody to you know, whatever I probably said last week, stab his fat little finger on the button, right?.
And so there's this huge emphasis on precision in the South as a counter. And I think that is precisely what you're seeing in at least the first set of announcements that the North Koreans, which is a kind of third cause, which is the North Koreans describe the first launch as an ultra-precision tactical guided missile. And I think – so that's their way of saying, oh, you say you have these precision capabilities.
Well, we have them too. And so if you try to kill Kim Jong-il, then we'll try to kill President Park.
Aaron
15:29
You see this to an extent in the Middle East, but it's that the nuclear umbrella – Or the nuclear factor in the Iranian case, if they ever were to achieve it, would give them freer hand to support proxy groups in, say, the Shiite-controlled areas in Saudi Arabia, and the weird way that that puts pressure on the alliance with the United States.
Like, is it our business to, say, defend... The Saudis from a Shiite insurrection, from what is essentially what we view as an internal problem, but they view as the hand of Iran. And so there are interesting parallels I see between the Asian context and the Middle Eastern context. Oh, I think you're exactly right.
Jeffrey
16:11
I mean, I think this is the big... I think of this as the fundamental issue for how we look at the challenge from proliferation. It's not that somebody slaps a warhead on a missile and uses it, but it's that they then feel like they can engage in provocations. You know, Saddam actually said this about his nuclear weapons.
He said, if you give me one, I will drown the Israelis in blood. And literally, he said, I won't use it, but I'll drown the Israelis in blood. And you know, he clearly... Had this idea that he could behave more aggressively if he were nuclear armed. You know what I thought when I read that? That man is not a safe driver.
Aaron
16:52
Yeah. I guess he would also wear a ski helmet but also go very fast. Probably. Yeah. No, it's very – this is just fascinating. I could go on for a very long time about this. But, I mean, let's loop this back over to the North Korean case. I mean, so – This multi-causes – I mean it's hard to put a finger on exactly what the North Koreans are thinking.
But is this propaganda that's aimed at the – this is what I've always been really interested about the North Korean case. We know that their own people get massive amounts of propaganda. What value do you think they ascribe to putting out this propaganda for us? Obviously, there's a level of propaganda and that we all love to get involved.
Are they enjoying the fact that we do podcasts about this and we are trying to dissect each one of their photos?
Jeffrey
17:43
Yeah, I think so. Oh, you know, we didn't talk about the fact that the photos might have been photoshopped, but I think that kind of does wrap us up. It gets us to this issue. So my colleague at 38 North, Scott LaFoy, well, he's not my colleague yet because he hasn't written anything for us yet, but he's real smart, and he has his own blog called Iron and Rice, and he went through the photos, and it's great because there are these two...
Images of the missile boosting through the clouds. And he was able to point out that they kind of presented it like it was one launch, but you can tell based on where Kim Jong-un is standing and where the rocket is that it's either two different launches, and we're pretty sure they launched at least two, and they just sort of released the pictures all together because the sky's a little darker, the rocket's in the same place, and Kim Jong-un has moved like two feet.
Right. He doesn't move very easily. I don't think he's very light of foot. Come on. He's swift like a cat. And so Scott was basically going through this and trying to figure out whether the photos had been Photoshopped or whether they were just kind of curated very carefully. And it's just really hard – it's really hard to tell.
So I think you do have to take – They clearly know we're watching this stuff. They clearly obscure things. They could have shown us the launcher for the first one, but they didn't. And you can see it. It's kind of behind Kim Jong-un's, well, sort of over his shoulder off in the distance. But it's just blurry enough that you can't really make it out.
So they, I think they know, and they definitely are having some fun at our expense. And so you have to be careful and very critical when you interpret these things, because it's a great source of information. But yeah, they know.
Aaron
19:41
Well, let's take a big picture here, and then we'll wrap it up here. I mean, what does... Yeah, I got to get lunch at a brasserie. Yeah, you got to go to a brasserie.
Jeffrey
19:50
Exactly, exactly. Thanks. Nice, nice, nice glass of wine.
Jeffrey
19:54
A salad chef show.
Aaron
19:56
Yeah. Funny thing about this, and we'll get back, is living here in Switzerland, I'm told that you drink Swiss wine at lunch because it has less alcohol, to which I always ask, who drinks wine at lunch? We have to do work. But that's just things.
Jeffrey
20:11
I'm on vacation.
Aaron
20:13
You are on vacation. But anyways, this big picture. What's going on in the Korean Peninsula? We have the big U.S. exercises. Now we have these. These, you know, launch of this release of all these pictures, things don't look very good. But I don't see anybody paying attention to it. Maybe besides people listening to our podcast.
Jeffrey
20:33
Right. So, you know, my colleague Josh Pollock and I have had this conversation repeatedly. We are both convinced that the situation on the peninsula is much more dire than most people give it credit for. And that's a function of Whatever state building the North Koreans are doing on their side involves a lot of provoking of the South Koreans.
And that runs from routinely referring to the South Korean president as a bitch, which is just inconceivable in Western propaganda, to staging these kinds of exercises, to, I think, always the possibility of a provocation like the sinking of the Chonan or shelling an island. And I think that the South Korean response, which is understandable because they're a democratic state and it's really hard for a democratically elected leader to look at this kind of situation and say, well, I can't do anything about it, is to talk about killing Kim Jong-un.
And I think that feeds this kind of cycle back and forth where you just have this constant threat. I'm just super worried that sooner or later the North Koreans are going to push the South Koreans too far and the South Koreans are going to take a swipe at him. And, you know, if that does and they miss, it's going to be ugly.
Aaron
21:49
Right. This goes back into more Cold War-type theorizing about escalations and rungs of escalation. But now, going back to what we were talking about earlier, we have the introduction of precision-guided conventional weapons and a doctrine that says, oh, We aren't going to retaliate with weapons of mass destruction. We're just going to go after leadership strikes.
Jeffrey
22:08
Well, you know, Iman Park, who was the president of South Korea when the Cheonan was sunk and Yongpyon Island was shelled by the North Koreans, gave an interview about a year ago where he said, oh, he would have retaliated, but it was the U.S. that held him back. And, you know, I mean, some of that's like a guy at a club, like, hold me back, hold me back.
Aaron
22:28
Right, right, exactly.
Jeffrey
22:32
But I think it's real in the following sense. It's real in that he feels the political pressure to do something. So imagine if the North Koreans stage a provocation at a time when now the South Korean president is facing a lot of political problems because of the ferry disaster. Maybe she just feels like she has no choice, that they've backed her into a corner.
It's not inconceivable to me. That the North Koreans, in all of their charming wisdom, will underestimate her or miscalculate her likely response.
Aaron
23:15
Politically, I just put myself in their shoes. Granted, I don't know very much because I haven't spent a significant amount of time there. As an American, if this happened to us, your initial response is always just to hit back. I don't see how a leader could go more than once without doing something in provocation. One thing that I found very interesting, and again, it's in the Middle Eastern context, and I guess we'll wrap up here just because I find it curious.
I don't know the answer. When Middle Eastern governments are provoked, and I'm thinking about Turkey, and they don't do anything about it. ISIS, this group, just took a bunch of Turkish people hostage, and they couldn't launch a special forces raid to get them back, or they didn't hit them with any type of strikes. The murmurs that go around on social media and stuff like that is, well, the Israelis are able to always buck up and just blast the hell out of Gaza whenever something goes wrong.
Why can't we do the same? Why is our military incapable of doing what the Israelis can do? Does that have a parallel in the Asian context? Maybe not with the Israelis, but why can't we take a swipe at these guys when they provoke us like other people do?
Jeffrey
24:26
I don't know that it has a specific country as a parallel, but I do think that the defining feature of South Korean and Japanese security policy has been their inability to act independently of the United States. That manifests itself in a lot of anxiety and I think a lot of frustration. And I think one reason that you see the South Koreans pushing so much for wartime operational control of forces and the development of ballistic missiles is precisely because they are increasingly frustrated operating under those constraints.
And as much as I think it's an unwelcome development, It's really hard to look at a democratic society and sort of argue that, like, you know, they shouldn't have those capabilities, right? Even if, again, I think, you know, we're the ones who get dragged into this at the end of the day, right? Exactly. And I think we'll wrap up here. It's just that some of our alliance Cold War structures, because the Cold War has ended and the threats are becoming more complex, are still necessary, but.
Aaron
25:44
But are quickly, I don't want to say spiraling out of control, but because they're growing more complex, the contingencies where we can be dragged into a conflict, I think are actually growing. And I don't think we've actually come up with a good response or policy yet to deal with this. Can regional instability in a certain place, like say in the Korean Peninsula, that in the past we could deal with through the superpower pressure, Now there is no second superpower to pressure the adversary, so you're left with one side trying, chomping at the bit to do something, and then us having to say, okay, if you do something, we have to help you out, even if we don't want to.
Jeffrey
26:23
Let's leave that one for the readers to figure out, and then I'm going to go hit the bar. Exactly.
Aaron
26:29
All right, so thanks a lot for listening, and we'll chat next week, I think, about Japan. Yeah.
Jeffrey
26:34
Okay, take care. All right, have a good one.
