How Nth Korea got missile engines
The new weapon’s propulsion system looks to some like a Soviet knockoff
Four months before its July 4 missile test, North Korea offered the world a rare technical preview of its latest missile engine, one said to be capable of lobbing nuclear warheads at US cities. A video on state-run TV depicted a machine with thickets of tubes and vents, and a shape that struck some US experts as familiar.
“It shocked me,” said Michael Elleman, one weapons expert who noticed jarring similarities with an engine he frequently encountered in Russia at the end of the Cold War.
After intensive study, Elleman, a former consultant at the Pentagon, and other specialists would report that they had detected multiple design features that echo those of a 1960s-era Soviet workhorse called the RD-250.
There is no record of Pyongyang’s obtaining blueprints for the Russian missile engine, and experts disagree on whether it ever did so.
But the discovery of similarities has focused new attention on a question that has dogged US analysts for at least the past two years: How has North Korea managed to make surprisingly rapid gains in its missile programme, despite economic sanctions and a near-universal ban on exports of military technology to the impoverished state?
Many weapons experts say North Korea’s startling display of missile prowess is a reflection of the country’s growing mastery of weapons technology, as well as its leader’s fierce determination to take the country into the nuclear club. But others see continuing evidence of an outsize role by foreigners, including Russian scientists who provided designs and know-how years ago, and the Chinese vendors who supply the electronics needed for modern missile-guidance systems.
While North Korea is known to have obtained other Soviet missile designs in the past, the new revelations suggest the possibility of a transfer of weapons secrets that has gone undetected until now. “It would mean that North Korea had a wider procurement network in the former Soviet Union than we had thought,” said Elleman, a missile expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies who oversaw the dismantling of Soviet-era missiles in Russia and Ukraine two decades ago. “My first question would be, ‘ What else have they got?’”
On October 15, 1992, police detained 60 Russian missile scien- US Air Force B-1B Lancer bombers, bottom left and third from top, fly with South Korean and US fighter jets over South Korea at the weekend. Two US bombers flew to the Korean Peninsula to join fighter jets from South Korea and Japan for a practice bombing run. And below, a file photo of a North Korean missile test. tists, along with their families, as they prepared to board a plane for North Korea at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo-2 Airport. Under questioning, the scientists confessed that they had been hired as a group to help the North Koreans build a modern missile fleet. In those early days after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was little work for Russia’s elite weapons scientists. Other scientists did make the journey in the 1990s, taking experience, parts and blueprints. Around the same time, North Korea also obtained sensitive nuclear technology from Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
The Russian Government has insisted it had nothing to do with the transfer of missile secrets to North Korea. But Soviet designs became the templates for a series of intermediate-range ballistic missiles built and tested by North Korea over the next two decades, with extra features and capabilities added by a new generation of engineers recruited from the country’s best schools. Still, the programme struggled, with many missiles blowing up on the launchpad.
But in recent years, North Korea has achieved a series of technical breakthroughs. Pyongyang has launched satellites into orbit and successfully tested one missile that can be fired from a submarine, and another that uses solid fuel, which allows for more mobility and a much faster launch. The Hwasong-10, a mobile, intermediate-range ballistic missile that was successfully tested last June, has been shown in independent analyses to be a modified version of a Russian missile commonly known as the R-27 Zyb. Last week, its Hwasong-14 missile became the first in North Korean history capable of travelling more than 5470km, the minimum distance needed to be classified as an intercontinental ballistic missile.
“The consensus has been that North Korea’s programme — missile as well as nuclear — is mostly indigenous,” said Laura Holgate, a top adviser on nonproliferation to the Obama Administration. “They con- tinue to seek to import commercial dual-use technologies for their weapons programmes, but the design and innovation is homegrown.”
David Cohen, a former deputy director of the CIA who had advised the Obama Administration on North Korea’s weapons advances, said: “The missiles they’re shooting now have some new engineering, but it’s all based on old Soviet models”.
Unable to purchase advanced technology on the open market, North Korea also remains dependent on smugglers and black-marketeers to obtain some of the parts it needs, particularly electronics, Cohen said.
The many failures in the past were simply part of the learning curve, said David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector. “Armed with the acquisition of many goods from abroad, North Korea appears to have devoted considerable resources to making the missiles domestically and, more importantly, figuring out how to launch them successfully.”
A key new element was most likely North Korean leader Kim Jong Un himself, who accelerated the pace of the country’s nuclear and missile development soon after taking power. “They are serious about trying to create a capability that could threaten the United States,” Elleman said.