Salvaged rocket parts launch UN probe
Report says key components were foreign-made, acquired from Chinese businesses
When North Korea launched its Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite into space last year, officials heralded the event as a birthday gift for dead leader Kim Jong Il. But the day also brought an unexpected prize for the country’s adversaries: priceless intelligence in the form of rocket parts that fell into the Yellow Sea.
Entire sections of booster rocket were snagged by South Korea’s navy and then scrutinized by international weapons experts for clues about the state of North Korea’s missile program. Along with motor parts and wiring, investigators discerned a pattern. Many key components were foreign-made, acquired from businesses based in China.
The trove “demonstrates the continuing critical importance of highend, foreign-sourced components” in building the missiles North Korea uses to threaten its neighbours, a UN expert team concluded in a report released last month. When UN officials contacted the Chinese firms to ask about the parts, the report said, they received only silence.
China’s complex relationship with North Korea was a key topic during last week’s U.S. visit by President Xi Jinping, as Trump administration officials urged Chinese counterparts to apply more pressure on Pyongyang to halt its work on nuclear weapons.
Yet, despite China’s public efforts to rein in North Korea’s provocative behaviour, Chinese companies continue to act as enablers, supplying the isolated communist regime with technology and hardware that allow its missiles to take flight, according to current and former U.S. and UN officials and independent weapons experts. The private assistance has included sensitive software and other items specifically banned for export to North Korea under UN Security Council sanctions, the officials said.
China has officially denied that such illegal exports exist, but investi- gations show restricted products were shipped privately to North Korea as recently as 18 months ago. Still unclear, analysts said, is whether the Chinese government tacitly approved of the exports, or is simply unable or unwilling to police the thousands of Chinese companies that account for more than 80 per cent of all foreign goods imported by North Korea each year. The Unha-3, the rocket that launched North Korea’s Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite into orbit on Feb. 7, 2016, was among the most powerful ever built by Kim Jong Un’s government. It is also the most worrisome. U.S. and South Korean intelligence officials have long believed that the three-stage, 30-metre-tall rocket was designed as a forerunner for a future nuclear-tipped space vehicle that could allow North Korea to threaten cities as far away as Washington.
North Korean engineers laced the rocket with explosives so that each stage would self-destruct while hur- tling back to Earth. Still, South Korean navy ships were waiting to scoop up any parts that survived, eventually harvesting enough components to allow a crude reconstruction of the entire rocket.
An extensive probe by U.S. and South Korean officials revealed that many of the components had been manufactured in Western countries and shipped to North Korea by Chinese distributors — a finding that was echoed in the UN Panel of Experts report made public on March 9.