NKorea missile program continues at secret bases
WASHINGTON — North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to U.S. intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Donald Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.
The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.
The existence of the ballistic missile bases, which North Korea has never acknowledged, contradicts Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination of a nuclear and missile program that the North had warned could devastate the United States.
"We are in no rush," Trump said of talks with the North at a news conference on Wednesday. "The sanctions are on. The missiles have stopped. The rockets have stopped. The hostages are home."
His statement was true in just one sense. Trump appeared to be referring to the halt of missile flight tests, which have not occurred in nearly a year. But U.S. intelligence officials say that the North’s production of nuclear material, of new nuclear weapons and of missiles that can be placed on mobile launchers and hidden in mountains at the secret bases has continued.
And the sanctions are collapsing, in part because North Korea has leveraged its new, softersounding relationship with Washington, and its stated commitment to eventual denuclearization, to resume trade with Russia and China.
Moreover, a U.S. program to track those mobile missiles with a new generation of small, inexpensive satellites is stalled. The Pentagon once hoped to have the first satellites over North Korea by now, giving it early warning if the mobile missiles are rolled out of mountain tunnels and prepared for launch.
But because of a series of budget and bureaucratic disputes, the early warning system, begun by the Obama administration and handed off to the Trump administration, has yet to go into operation. Current and former officials, who said they could not publicly discuss the program because it is heavily classified, said there was still hope of launching the satellites, but they offered no timeline.
The secret ballistic missile bases were identified in a detailed study to be published Monday by the Beyond Parallel program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major think tank in Washington.
The program, which focuses on the prospects of North-South integration, is led by Victor Cha, a prominent North Korea expert whom the Trump administration considered appointing as the ambassador to South Korea last year. His name was pulled back when he objected to the White House strategy for dealing with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader.