Pyongyang accused of ‘hiding bases’

At least 13 missile facilities undeclared

WASHINGTON: North Korea is operating at least 13 undeclared bases to hide mobile, nuclear-capable missiles, a new study asserted on Monday, as progress stalls on US President Donald Trump’s signature foreign policy initiative.

Mr Trump has hailed his June summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as having opened the way to the North’s denuclearisation, defusing tensions that less than a year ago brought the two countries to the brink of conflict.

Since the summit in Singapore, North Korea has forgone nuclear and missile tests, dismantled a missile test site and promised to also break up the country’s main nuclear complex if the US makes concessions.

But researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington said they had located 13 missile operating bases that had not been declared by the government, and that there may be as many as 20.

“It’s not like these bases have been frozen,” Victor Cha, who leads CSIS’s North Korea program, told The New York

Times, which first reported on the study and headlined its findings as suggesting a “great deception” by Pyongyang.

“Work is continuing,” said Mr Cha. “What everybody is worried about is that Trump is going to accept a bad deal — they give us a single test site and dismantle a few other things, and in return they get a peace agreement.”

But the South Korean government and analysts played down the report, saying that the facilities had been known about for years and Pyongyang had never offered to give them up.

The bases are scattered across the country in underground facilities tunneled in narrow mountain valleys, according to the CSIS researchers, and designed for mobile missile launchers to quickly exit and move to previously prepared launch sites.

Bases for strategic weapons such as intercontinental ballistic missiles — whose development is the subject of sanctions — are located deep inside the country.

Medium-range missiles capable of striking Japan and all of South Korea reportedly are deployed in an operational belt 90 to 150 kilometres north of the Demilitarised Zone that divides the peninsula.

Shorter-range missiles fit into a tactical belt 50 to 90km from the DMZ.

The researchers’ findings were based on satellite imagery, defector interviews and interviews with intelligence and government officials. A Digital Globe satellite image shows what the CSIS Beyond Parallel project reports is an undeclared missile operating base at Sakkanmol, North Korea.

The South Korean government and analysts played down the report, saying there was “not much new” about the findings.

“I don’t see a kind of ground breaking or new information really,” said Daniel Pinkston, a lecturer at Troy University in Seoul, adding the Sakkanmol site the report highlighted “has been known for a long time, for at least 20 years”.

Vipin Narang of MIT tweeted: “Kim literally ordered ballistic missiles to be mass produced on New Year’s day 2018.”

“He never offered to stop producing them, let alone give them up,” he added, saying that “the characterisation of ‘deception’ is highly misleading. There’s no deal to violate”.