NORTH KOREA EXPANDING MISSILEMAKING PLANT: REPORT

North Korea continued to develop a key rocket-engine facility in the run-up to Kim Jong Un’s summit with US President Donald Trump, according to an independent analysis of satellite imagery.

The Middlebury Institute of International Studies report found that North Korea has recently expanded a factory complex in the city of Hamhung that produces key engines for solidfuel ballistic missiles. The factory also makes other missile components, including re-entry vehicles for warheads that could be used on longer-range missiles capable of reaching the US.

“The expansion suggests that, despite hopes for denuclearisation, Kim Jong Un is committed to increasing North Korea’s stockpile of nuclear-armed missiles,” the report’s authors David Schmerler and Jeffrey Lewis wrote.

The analysis, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, is the latest to undercut Trump’s assurances that North Korea is “no longer a nuclear threat” after his June 12 meeting with Kim in Singapore. US intelligence officials have separately concluded that Kim was seeking to conceal his nuclear weapons stockpile and had no intention of surrendering his arsenal, NBC News reported.

The Middlebury report examined imagery from the weeks before the Trump-Kim summit, in which Kim agreed to “work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.”

The factory in question produces wound-filament airframes and nozzles for engines used in solid-fuel missiles, particularly the Pukguksong series of rockets, the report said. Such missiles are more concerning to US military planners because they can be kept hidden while fuelled, making them harder to target during any attack.