N. Korea makes big gains in sea-based missile technology
A few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a group of American investors and Russian scientists struck a deal to begin marketing one of the crown jewels of Moscow’s strategic arsenal: an entire family of missiles designed for launch from submarines.
Up for sale were powerful missiles called “Calm” and “Ripple,” built to lob heavy warheads into space from a barge or a submarine tube, and a new model called “Surf” that could be rolled off the side of a ship and fired straight out of the water. The idea of the joint venture, as one of its U.S. partners wrote in early 1993, was to link American satellite companies to a top Russian weapons laboratory to “convert potentially threatening submarine missiles into peaceful space boosters.”
The Americans quickly ran aground on a series of legal and bureaucratic barriers, but the Russians forged ahead with a new partner willing to pay cash for Soviet military technology: North Korea. More than two decades later, some of the Soviet designs are reappearing, one after another, in surprisingly sophisticated missiles that have turned up on North Korean launchpads over the past two years. Now, newly uncovered documents offer fresh clues about the possible origins of those technical advances, some of which seemed to outside observers to have come from nowhere.
“The question that has long been raised is: Did North Korea get this technology from a [Russian] fire sale?” asked David Wright, a missiles expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Did they get plans years ago and are just now at the point where they can build these things?”
North Korea is known to have relied on Russian parts and designs for its older missiles, including the Scud derivatives that had dominated its stockpile since the 1980s. The newly uncovered documents include technical drawings for much more advanced missiles — designs that include features seen in some of the newest missiles in North Korea’s expanding arsenal.
The documents from the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau include marketing brochures for an array of top-ofthe-line Soviet missiles that were able to deliver nuclear warheads to U.S. cities. Initially designed for the Soviet navy’s nuclear submarines, some of the models offered for sale could be launched from a large boat, a submerged barge, or a capsule dropped into the ocean, negating the need for a modern submarine fleet.
“The missile could be floated and ignited without any need for a launch platform,” recalled Kyle Gillman, the former executive vice president for the U.S.-Russian joint venture known as Sea Launch Investors. Gillman, who negotiated the business agreement with Russia’s Makeyev scientists, reviewed and authenticated the documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The evidence that the designs eventually ended up in North Korea is partly circumstantial. In the summer of 1993, with the U.S.-Russian project flagging, more than a 60 Russian missile scientists and family members from the Makeyev facility were arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport as they prepared to travel to Pyongyang to work as consultants. U.S., Russian and South Korean intelligence officials later concluded that some of the scientists eventually succeeded in traveling to North Korea to offer blueprints and technical advice for the country’s missiles program.
But U.S. analysts see more persuasive evidence in the actual missiles that North Korea has put on display over the past two years. In the most striking case, the Hwasong-10, or Musudan, a single-stage missile successfully tested by North Korea in June 2016, appears to use the same engine and many design features as the Soviet Union’s R-27 Zyb, a submarine-launched ballistic missile designed by Makeyev scientists and advertised in one of the brochures obtained by The Post.
The fact that it has taken Pyongyang so long to exploit the Russian designs is perplexing, but North Korea had long lacked the sophisticated materials, engineering expertise and computer-driven machine tools for the kinds of advanced missiles it has recently tested, weapons experts say. With an industrial base enhanced by years of slow, patient acquisition efforts, North Korea is only now in a position to capitalize on technology it had been sitting on for years or even decades, analysts say.
“North Korea was just recently able to acquire machine tools that were state-of-theart in the 1990s, meaning they are still damn good machine tools,” Wright said. “Once you have the plans, and are able to get your hands on the materials and the right kinds of tools, you have a real leg up.”
The U.S. founders of Sea Launch Investors saw their joint project with the Russians as the profitable answer to two pressing global concerns, company documents show.
One was a shortage of launch capacity for a new generation of satellites servicing the rapidly expanding global telecommunications industry. The other was the problem of newly idle weapons scientists working in labs and factories across the former Soviet Union. The abrupt halt to the Cold War in 1991 had upended the careers of the thousands of physicists, chemists, microbiologists and engineers who built the Red Army’s vast stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, along with the missiles for delivering them. Once among the elites of Soviet society, these highly skilled scientists now faced an uncertain future with little meaningful work and a plummeting standard of living.