N. Korea builds artificial islands

BEIJING — North Korea is building artificial islands in the Yellow Sea and topping them with what appear to be military installations, satellite images reveal.

The development suggests that North Korea has taken a cue from China, which has been stoking regional tensions by building and militarizing several artificial islands in the South China Sea in recent years. The images show that North Korea has been working for at least five years on the islands near Sohae, 70 miles northwest of Pyongyang, the capital. Sohae is known as a testing site for intercontinental ballistic missile technology.

As late as 2012, three of the islands, which are scattered around a small peninsula jutting into the Yellow Sea, were rocky, tree-studded specks; two were patches of sand. In Google Earth images from December 2016, all appear to contain features consistent with military installations, such as wide roads and paved, rectangular lots. All are in North Korea’s waters, close to the country’s shoreline.

Their purpose remains unclear.

“We can’t make definitive statements as to what these islands are being used for,” said Ryan Barenklau, chief executive of Strategic Sentinel, a Washington-based intelligence firm that has analyzed the images and wrote about them in the Diplomat, an online magazine.

Military use is likely, he said. Roads on the islands feature wide turns, indicating that they could be used for transporter erector launchers: massive, missile-bearing trucks.

Light patches on the rectangular lots could be heatresistant cement, a sign that they may have been designed as launch pads.

“And they have observation areas, for someone like (the country’s leader) Kim Jong Un to observe a missile launch,” he said.

“Every time we see VIP buildings, that tells us there’s most likely a military application, because Kim Jong Un likes to view the operations of whatever they’re building.

“At first we were really concerned about what the initial purpose of those islands are — whether they’re for military or agriculture purposes — but when we saw the observation decks, we thought, those are military.”