North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is headed to the moon.
That, at least, is one of the official North Korean explanations for the testing last week of a rocket engine that, if as powerful as the North claims, would rival the commercial rockets that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, of Amazon and Tesla, now use in their aerospace companies to fire payloads into space.
Inside the US intelligence agencies, though, there is considerable skepticism that North Korea is truly eager to plant a flag on the lunar landscape. The agencies are exploring another explanation: that Kim is racing ahead, as the US is distracted by a bruising presidential election, to develop a way for his growing arsenal of nuclear weapons to reach New York and Washington.
Illustration: Mountain People
North Korea might not be working alone. An intelligence finding that the US quietly made public in January suggests that the development of the North’s big engine, which it claims produces 80 tonnes of thrust, might be part of a joint partnership with Iran.
A US Department of the Treasury announcement of sanctions against Iranian officials and engineers named two who had “traveled to North Korea to work on an 80 tonne rocket booster being developed by the North Korean government.”
The administration of US President Barack Obama has responded to North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests with gradually escalating sanctions, mostly through the US. However, on Monday it went a step farther, announcing criminal charges and Treasury Department sanctions against four Chinese individuals and a company that it said engaged in money laundering to help Pyongyang’s programs for weapons of mass destruction.
The sanctions were against the Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Co and its primary owner, Ma Xiaohong (馬曉紅), who lives near the North Korean border.
URGENT THREAT
Few threats as urgent as the dramatic escalation of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are likely to confront Democratic US candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton or Republican US candidate Donald Trump as president.
An engine that delivers 80 tonnes of thrust would have about three times the power of an advanced North Korean rocket shown in a ground test in April, though it is not possible to verify the North’s claims.
By most unclassified estimates, it will take North Korea perhaps five years to marry its missile advances with a weapon small enough and strong enough to survive the stresses of re-entering the atmosphere atop an intercontinental ballistic missile.
So far, Kim’s engineers have never executed a military test flight that could reach beyond the middle of the Pacific Ocean, though in a statement on Friday last week, North Korea threatened to attack Guam, home of the US B-1 bombers that conducted simulated runs last week over the Korean Peninsula.
The potential links to Iran complicate the issue. Iran has ignored a UN Security Council resolution, passed in conjunction with last year’s agreement freezing its nuclear program, to refrain from tests of nuclear-capable missiles for eight years.
US President Barack Obama’s administration has not sought sanctions, knowing they would be vetoed by Russia and China, nor has it said much in public about the details of the cooperation on the new rocket engine. There is a long history of sharing missile technology, but no persuasive evidence exists that the Iranians have been involved in the North’s nuclear weapons tests.
The moonshot talk might be aspirational, but it is not lunacy. Rocket experts say four of the new North Korean engines, clustered at the base of a space vehicle, would be powerful enough to hurl a no-frills payload to the moon. However, the North would have to master many other technologies before even an unmanned vehicle could be landed there.
In an interview last month with The Associated Press, the director of the scientific research department of North Korea’s National Aerospace Development Administration, Hyon Kwang-il, said a moonshot was the nation’s goal.
“Even though the US and its allies try to block our space development, our aerospace scientists will conquer space and definitely plant the flag of the DPRK on the moon,” he said, using the abbreviation for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Whatever the goal, the most important aspect of the new North Korean engine is that its design appears to be indigenous, rather than a knockoff of decades-old Soviet missiles. That suggests a growing domestic ability, which might explain the appeal to Iran, which intelligence officials speculate might be helping to fund the effort.
“It is like nothing we have seen before,” said John Schilling, an expert on North Korea’s missile program at 38 North, a blog and think tank of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, of the powerful new engine.
“It is somewhat frightening that they have this capability, but somewhat encouraging that they want to use it for space launching,” he said.
History shows that any strides in rocketry, no matter what the claimed purpose, can aid both civil and military programs.
“That’s what the United States did,” said David Rothkopf, who has written two histories of the US National Security Council.
“It’s what the Russians did. It’s what the Chinese did. Why not the North Koreans?” he said.
US officials would not publicly say that the program referred to in the US Treasury sanctions was the same one that resulted in last week’s test. However, there was no other logical conclusion.
The announcement identified “Iranian missile technicians” from companies working for the Iranian Ministry of Defense for Armed Forces Logistics.
It said that two of them, Seyed Mirahmad Nooshin and Sayyed Medhi Farahi, “have been critical to the development of the 80 tonne rocket booster, and both traveled to Pyongyang during contract negotiations.”
Schilling said the big new engine seemed more suited to launching satellites and space probes than warheads. The North Korean military is known to prefer missiles small enough to transport on trucks, haul on back roads and hide in tunnels.
RIDICULED
However, North Korea is also highly aware that its launching failures in past years have become the stuff of ridicule on the Internet, making it easy to dismiss the program. It seems to be looking for something that would create at least the impression that it will not take long for it to fly to the moon or strike any part of the US.
“You cluster four of them together, and that is a very healthy ICBM,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a North Korea specialist at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.
Of course, moving from a static engine test to a cross-Pacific flight test would take considerable time, and the rocket would be a giant sitting duck for US targeting on the launchpad.
One possibility is that the North is trying to replicate elements of the US’ “triad” — the creation of a nuclear arsenal that can be delivered by aircraft, ground-based missile silos and submarines. A recent missile launch by North Korea appeared to have been from a submarine.
The North Koreans might be thinking: “Why not have everything?” Lewis added.
David Wright, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, group that monitors proliferation, argued that the North Korea advance could well end up powering ICBMs from deep silos.
He said that the high power of the new North Korean engine was similar to one that Chinese scientists developed to power that nation’s first long-range missile.
Wright, in a blog post on the North Korean advance, said that the Chinese rocket, known as the DF-5 (for Dong Feng, or East Wind), “could carry a nuclear warhead to anywhere in the United States.”
“Who knows what North Korea might want to do?” Wright said. “At this point, I don’t think we can take an ICBM off the table.”
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this