Author Archives: J-Pollack

What Missile Defense Is Supposed To Do

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It’s possible to envision the world — either the physical world or the social and political world — as being like either “a clock or a cloud”:http://www.jstor.org/pss/2010037. Either it’s deterministic and ultimately knowable — you know, like clockwork — or it’s chaotic, irreducibly complex, and elusive. Like a cloud.

Me, I don’t subscribe to either a “clock theory” of politics or a “cloud theory.” I subscribe to a “stopped clock” theory. But that’s only because I’ve been following missile defense issues for so very long. Few people who have an opinion in the first place ever really change their mind about missile defenses. For altogether too many devotees of the subject, the hands of their mental clocks are always pointing in a “fixed direction”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1950/deep-missile-defense-thought.

To be clear, it’s possible to have reasoned discussions about this subject, even across the divide of instinctively held viewpoints. But not with anyone and everyone.

All of this is by way of justifying a narrow focus on one little snippet of “Charles Krauthammer’s extensively flawed column”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/09/AR2009070902363.html of late last week:

bq. [An offense-defense linkage] is important for Russia because of the huge American technological advantage in defensive weaponry. We can reliably shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile. They cannot.

Just two points.

First, GMD — America’s existing strategic BMD system — has no known or anticipated capability against Russian missiles. According to MDA, current and planned capabilities are oriented to North Korea and Iran. According to this “fact sheet”:http://www.mda.mil/mdaLink/pdf/bmds.pdf, for example,

bq. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense element is now deployed in Alaska and California to defend the U.S. homeland against a limited attack from countries like North Korea and Iran and is also being developed for deployment in Europe to defend against an attack from Iran.

(There are even more explicit statements to this effect in older MDA budget documents, but they don’t seem to be online anymore. I’ll see if I can’t dig one up. *Update:* “Found it”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2069/can-gmd-stop-russian-missiles!)

There is a longstanding dispute in expert circles — one of those disputes that never gets resolved — about whether GMD is actually capable of coping with North Korean or Iranian “countermeasures”:http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_weapons_and_global_security/missile_defense/technical_issues/countermeasures-a-technical.html. So far as I’m aware, there is no dispute in the United States — none — about the system’s ability to cope with Russian countermeasures. It hasn’t any.

Second, against a North Korea-type threat, Russian missile defense may be ahead of U.S. missile defense. The “A-135 defensive system around Moscow”:http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/russia/abm3.htm, so far as I know, is still nuclear-armed, which should provide it with certain advantages over the hit-to-kill systems now favored by the United States. “Richard Garwin’s presentation”:http://fas.org/rlg/Garwin,%206-03-2009,%200715-SHARE%20YES.pdf for a missile defense conference last month happened to address this point:

bq.. [Since the 1950s,] Our Strategic Military Panel tried its hardest to help make U.S. ICBMs and SLBMs effective and to give them the ability to penetrate potential Soviet missile defenses, whether armed with nuclear warheads or conventional. On the other hand, we tried our best to devise and to evaluate systems for defending the United States against nuclear-armed Soviet missiles. So we early-on analyzed such techniques and technologies as multiple independently-targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs), various other countermeasures and tactics, such as attacking and blinding the defense, and antisimulation.

In the 1960s, the technology was not available to have homing intercept against warheads in space, so that the only feasible BMD systems used nuclear-armed interceptors. Even for the nuclear BMD, mid-course intercept is problematical because of the availability of countermeasures, together with the ability of the offense readily to stretch out the string of warheads and decoys for many hundreds of km along the trajectory even to a specific point target. …

Countermeasures become a lot simpler against the small kinetic-energy intercept (KEI) kill vehicles that form the core of current U.S. BMD efforts. The homing kill vehicle (HKV) either collides with the warhead or it doesn’t.

p. Bottom line: Don’t go looking for deep insights into strategic systems on the op-ed page of the _Post_.

Nuclear Holocaust, Crazy State

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I’ve thought three times before posting this. Four times. It’s so bleak that it’s difficult to digest. But it gives too much insight into the regnant Israeli view of nuclear deterrence to withhold comment.

The recently published “interview with Uzi Arad”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1099064.html by Ari Shavit in _Ha’aretz_ includes this passage about nuclear deterrence failure:

bq.. [Arad] On the face of it, what is the point of this? Why execute the enemy after deterrence has failed? But according to Dror, it is important to ascertain that the deterrence will work, even if you yourself have been destroyed. He sees this as a contribution to the repair of the world (tikkun olam).* When we say “never again,” this entails three imperatives: never again will we be felled in mass numbers, never again will we be defenseless and never again will there be a situation in which those who harm us go unpunished.

[Shavit] Is the Holocaust relevant to our strategic thought in an era of a nuclear Middle East?

[Arad] Look at the way memory guides people like Netanyahu, who refers time and again to the 1930s. Bernard Lewis also said a few years ago that he feels like he is in the late 1930s. What did he mean? On the one hand, an imminent threat, rapidly approaching, and on the other, complacency and conciliation and a cowering coveting of peace. When I visited Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem) not long ago, I could not bear the psychological overload and left halfway through. I don’t think there is an Israeli or a Jew who can be insensitive to the Holocaust. It is a painful black hole in our consciousness.

[Shavit] When you look around today, what is your feeling? Are we alone?

[Arad] We are always alone. Sometimes we have partners and lovers and donors of money, but no one is in our shoes.

p. (*This is an unusual interpretation of “tikkun olam”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikkun_olam, to say the least. Usually it means something like “social justice” and suggests making the world a better place. At least in the present context, it might be understood as meaning “cosmic justice.”)

The “Dror” to whom Arad refers must be Yehezkel Dror, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He may be better known for his “work on public policy”:http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=yehezkel%20dror “and the social sciences”:http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/d/dror_yehezkel.html, but in 1971, he produced a small book published in English as “Crazy States: A Counterconventional Strategic Problem”:http://books.google.com/books?id=fILdAAAACAAJ.

Lacking a copy at hand, I’ll turn to the summary in Barry Wolf, “When the Weak Attack the Strong: Failures of Deterrence”:http://www.rand.org/pubs/notes/N3261/. As part of his discussion of “highly motivated” attackers, Wolf provides this sketch of Dror’s idea:

bq.. A “crazy state” culture may also result in a cost-benefit calculus that is difficult for outsiders to comprehend. The term “crazy state” has been used by Yehezkel Dror to refer to such groups as “the Christian Crusaders or the Islam Holy Warriors… anarchists… contemporary terrorist groups… Nazi Germany; and–to a more limited extent–Japan before the Second World War.” Although Dror’s concept is multidimensional and cannot be easily defined, the historical examples he uses tend to be groups with an extremely strong commitment to nonrational (by contemporary Western standards) ideologies and a willingness to use force to realize their goals. It is important to remember that the term “crazy state” is used to identify states whose cost-benefit calculus may be extremely difficult for a contemporary Westerner to understand; the term is not a judgment that the state’s values are “crazy” in an absolute or universal sense.

Many states that have attacked substantially stronger counterparts certainly could have been “crazy states,” the Jewish zealots who revolted against Rome being an especially likely example. Both Iran and Libya can arguably be considered states of this type, and a “crazy state” cost-benefit calculus seems likely to have contributed to their attacks against U.S. forces. A weak “crazy state” led by a psychopathological leader may have particularly great potential to take actions that appear to defy logic; Adolf Hitler’s Germany occupied the Rhineland at a time (1936) when France’s army was substantially stronger than Germany’s. Although Hitler in that case read Allied intentions correctly, perhaps no wholly sane leader would have taken this risk because the consequences of failure would have been so terrible. As Hitler himself said, “A retreat on our part would have spelled collapse.”

p. This post has gone on long enough already, and it’s not my intention to revisit the not-so-great “rationality debate”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2042/regime-types-and-deja-vu here. Suffice it to say that there’s not a person alive, let alone a nation-state, that conducts its affairs in keeping with the “von Neuman-Morgenstern axioms”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility#Additive_von_Neumann-Morgenstern_Utility. Vague objectives, impulsivity, and gross errors are altogether commonplace. The worst outcomes are rare, but we are condemned to live with uncertainty.

So let’s conclude with one last snippet from Arad, who insists that Israel must “must not be militant, but we must entrench our defense and security prowess and act with wisdom and restraint and caution and sangfroid.” That much, I think, is hard to argue with.

Fireworks Rundown

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So you were wondering what it was the North Koreans fired off on July 4 this year. Yeah, me too. Here’s what the South Korean press has been reporting.

According to “Joongang Ilbo”:http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2907043, it was all in a day’s work:

bq. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff confirmed Saturday that North Korea launched two missiles between 8 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., with a third following at 10:45 a.m. and a fourth at noon. The North then launched one each at 2:50 p.m., 4:10 p.m. and 5:40 p.m.

That makes seven.

Citing _Chosun Ilbo,_ the Associated Press “breaks out the types”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090706/ap_on_re_as/as_nkorea_missile_70 as follows:

bq.. On Monday, South Korea’s mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported the launches were believed to have included three Scud-ER missiles with a range of up to 620 miles (1,000 kilometers).

The paper said the Scud-ER has a longer range and better accuracy compared with previous Scud series so is “particularly a threat to Japan.”

[snip]

The Chosun Ilbo, citing a government source it did not name, said the other four missiles were two Scud-C missiles with a range of 310 miles (500 kilometers) and two medium-range Rodong missiles that can travel up to 810 miles (1,300 kilometers).

Five of the seven missiles flew about 260 miles (420 kilometers) from an eastern coastal launch site [Kittaeryong] and landed in one area, meaning their accuracy has improved, the paper said.

p. Now, for comparison, let’s roll back the clock to July 5, 2006. According to the July 2006 issue of _IISS Strategic Comments_, on that occasion, they launched the following items (as “assessed” by someone) from the Kittaeryong base (with one exception):

  1. 0333: Scud-D
  2. 0404: No-dong
  3. 0501: Taepo-dong 2 (from Musudan-ri)
  4. 0712: Scud-C
  5. 0731: No-dong
  6. 0732: Scud-ER / No-dong
  7. 1720: No-dong
All times are local.

(What’s a Scud-D, you ask, if it’s not a Scud-ER or a Nodong? I’m not sure. The naming conventions are very messy.)

So once again, seven launches, and setting aside the TD-2, the types were similar. But in 2009, the DPRK missile crews were allowed to sleep in for awhile. No pre-dawn launches.

One final note. The “Korea Times”:http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/07/113_47917.html has an estimate of how many theater missiles North Korea has:

bq. The North is believed to have about 1,000 ballistic missiles alone — including nearly 700 Scud missiles of various types and 320 Rodong missiles.

It sounds like the DPRK has plenty of provocations in its quiver.

Iran Misconceptions — Plus One

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David Albright and Jackie Shire of ISIS fame have published a paper on “seven misconceptions about Iran’s nuclear program”:http://www.isisnucleariran.org/static/297/. It’s worth a read.

While we’re on the topic — just for the heck of it — I’d like to add an eighth misconception. Notwithstanding legitimate concerns about “breakout”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1890/more-breakoutology, it is mistaken to assume that there is a linear relationship between how many centrifuges are spinning at Natanz and when Iran “gets the Bomb.” It’s a bit more complicated than that. Breaking out of the NPT — whether by treaty action or by sneaking out — would be an extremely risky proposition, no matter how many centrifuges Iran builds.

Under the logic of a worst-case scenario, where sheer enrichment capability leads to swift weaponization, heedless of consequences, breakout would have happened already.

That’s why “attention-getting phrases”:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124701167148308659.html#mod=todays_us_page_one like “the window is closing” or “the clock is ticking” can be a little misleading. Breakout is a high-stakes leadership decision, not a technological threshold.

*Update*. Herb Keinon in the _Jerusalem Post_ — or rather, his anonymous sources — “make exactly this point”:http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1246443770383&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull:

bq.. “I would be careful about all the declarations on this matter,” said one senior government official who deals with the issue, adding that a decision by Teheran to go full throttle toward the building of a bomb was dependent on numerous different decisions the government would have to make, and which it had simply not yet made.

In the meantime, the official said, the Iranians have decided to continue to enrich as much low grade uranium as they can, and to also continue development in the field of ballistic missiles at a level that would not make their situation with the international community much worse than it already is.

p. Exactly right!

*Update 2*. I should also mention “this recently published interview”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1099064.html in _Ha’aretz_ with Uzi Arad, a senior adviser to the Israeli prime minister (and very possibly the anonymous person quoted above). The passage starts with a question by the interviewer, Ari Shavit:

bq.. [Shavit] Your main front as national security adviser will be the danger of a nuclear Iran and a nuclear Middle East. But as far as we know, Iran has already crossed the point of nuclear no-return and has enough fissionable material to assemble a first nuclear bomb.

[Arad] The point of nuclear no-return was defined as the point at which Iran has the ability to complete the cycle of nuclear fuel production on its own; the point at which it has all the elements to produce fissionable material without depending on outsiders. Iran is now there. I don’t know if it has mastered all the technologies, but it is more or less there. However, *the term “no-return” is misleading. Even if Iran has fissionable material for one bomb, it is still at a low grade of enrichment. And if it wants to conduct a test, it will not have even one bomb. It follows that Iran is not yet nuclear and not yet operational. Serious obstacles still lie in the way. The international community still has enough time to make it stop of its own volition.*

Still, looking back, we see a dramatic failure here. A red line was defined and Iran crossed it.

p. Emphasis added. I tried to make “a similar point”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1871/iran-when-should-we-panic back in February:

bq. First, 1 SQ would be one heck of a thing to exit the NPT over. If the Iranians tested their first and only nuclear device to demonstrate that they had it, they would promptly stop having it. So 2 SQ would be the realistic threshold of concern, and even that seems a bit low. The North Korean precedent is instructive: they didn’t proclaim themselves to be nuclear-armed, or prove that point, until they had enough plutonium on hand for maybe half a dozen devices.

Incidentally, the passage from the interview shown above contains the first explicit definition I’ve yet seen of “point of no return,” a phrase much favored by Israeli talking heads when discussing the Iranian nuclear program.

Joint Statement on Missile Defense Issues

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Since “Jeff”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2379/follow-on-to-start and “Pavel”:http://russianforces.org/blog/2009/07/good_progress_at_the_moscow_su.shtml already have done such a nice job explicating the “Joint Understanding for the START Follow-On Treaty,” I’d thought I’d chime in with a couple of thoughts about its poor cousin, the “Joint Statement by Dmitry A. Medvedev, President of the Russian Federation, and Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, on Missile Defense Issues.”

The first thing to notice about the “Joint Statement”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Joint-Statement-by-Dmitry-A-Medvedev-President-of-the-Russian-Federation-and-Barack-Obama-President-of-the-United-States-of-America-on-Missile-Defense-Issues/ is that it’s not part of the Joint Understanding. In fact, it doesn’t represent any kind of real understanding, in the sense of an arrangement, agreement, pact, or even a common perspective. As President Obama explained in an “interview with Novaya Gazeta”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Transcript-of-President-Obamas-Interview-with-Novaya-Gazeta/, defenses aren’t part of the workplan:

bq. In our meeting in London on April 1st, President Medvedev and I issued a joint statement on instructions for our negotiators for this new treaty. These instructions very explicitly did not mention missile defense as a topic of discussion for these negotiations.

p. Indeed, the “April 1 text”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Joint-Statement-by-Dmitriy-A-Medvedev-and-Barack-Obama/ says that the “subject of the new agreement will be the reduction and limitation of strategic offensive arms.” There’s no mention of defenses. President Medvedev seems to have preferred otherwise, but had to settle, both in April and now again in July. As Pavel has “pointed out”:http://russianforces.org/blog/2009/07/will_missile_defense_derail_st.shtml, there’s no good reason to let disputes over the “third site” undermine the renewal of START.

The second thing to notice about the Joint Statement is that it doesn’t deal with missile defense issues. After the title, it doesn’t mention them at all. Here’s how the substantive paragraph starts:

bq. We have instructed our experts to work together to analyze the ballistic missile challenges of the 21st century and to prepare appropriate recommendations, giving priority to the use of political and diplomatic methods.

p. In the “press conference Q&A”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Press-Conference-by-President-Obama-and-President-Medvedev-of-Russia/, Obama referred to this as “a joint threat assessment of the ballistic missile challenges of the 21st century, including those posed by Iran and North Korea.” When that assessment comes due — assuming there’s a public version — it will be interesting to compare it with the “EWI Iran missile threat report”:http://www.ewi.info/groundbreaking-us-russia-joint-threat-assessment-iran-0.

Then there’s this:

bq. At the same time they plan to conduct a joint review of the entire spectrum of means at our disposal that allow us to cooperate on monitoring the development of missile programs around the world. Our experts are intensifying dialogue on establishing the Joint Data Exchange Center, which is to become the basis for a multilateral missile-launch notification regime.

p. Some of you may recall JDEC, an undertaking of the Clinton-Yeltsin era that never quite materialized. (“Fact sheet”:http://clinton5.nara.gov/WH/New/Europe-0005/factsheets/fs–joint-warning-center.html and “Memorandum”:http://clinton5.nara.gov/WH/New/Europe-0005/factsheets/memo–joint-warning-center.html.) Intended to “strengthen strategic stability by further reducing the danger that ballistic missiles might be launched on the basis of false warning of attack,” it has languished. Reviving JDEC is a welcome development, and the multilateralization idea is interesting, but neither has much to do with missile defense. [Correction: Indirectly but significantly, “JDEC does relate to missile defense”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1989/russia-north-korea-worse-than-you-thought.]

The Joint Statement is not the end of the story. Obama also mentioned to “Novaya Gazeta”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Transcript-of-President-Obamas-Interview-with-Novaya-Gazeta/ that the U.S. side will be conducting a review of its missile defense programs, and would like Russia to participate in whatever defenses are built in Europe. While this idea originated with Russian President Vladimir Putin, it remains to be seen whether it will satisfy the Russian side. The details will count.

“X-posted to ACW”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2380/joint-statement-on-missile-defense-issues. See the “comments at ACW”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2380/joint-statement-on-missile-defense-issues#comment.

Spot the Difference

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This item is brought to you by the Dept. of Non-Correction Corrections.

1) David Sanger and Nazila Fathi, “Iran Test-Fires Missile With 1,200-Mile Range “:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/world/middleeast/21iran.html, _New York Times,_ May 21, 2009:

bq.. Though she avoided details, Mrs. Clinton was giving voice to a growing concern among administration officials, who have now had time to review the intelligence, that Iran seems to have made significant progress in at least two of the three technologies necessary to field an effective nuclear weapon.

The first is enriching uranium to weapons grade, now under way at the large nuclear complex at Natanz.

p. 2) David Sanger, “Despite Crisis, Policy on Iran Is Engagement”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/world/middleeast/06policy.html, _New York Times,_ July 6, 2009:

bq. Israeli officials have been deeply uncomfortable with Mr. Obama’s engagement offer, arguing that Iran is still adding centrifuges to its plant at Natanz, where it can enrich uranium. The last report of the International Atomic Energy Agency indicated roughly 7,000 centrifuges are now enriching uranium into fuel, but without further enrichment it is suitable only for nuclear power.

Way back in ’04, Daniel Okrent, who was at the time public editor of the _New York Times,_ did readers the signal service of defining and explaining “the rowback”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/weekinreview/the-public-editor-setting-the-record-straight-but-who-can-find-the-record.html. What he wrote then applies just as well today:

bq. The editors who decided to handle the clarification this way may not know the term, but this was a classic example of the rowback. The one definition I could find for this ancient technique, from journalism educator Melvin Mencher, describes a rowback as “a story that attempts to correct a previous story without indicating that the prior story had been in error or without taking responsibility for the error.” A less charitable definition might read, “a way that a newspaper can cover its butt without admitting it was ever exposed.”

For previous commentary on the May 21 story, see “here”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2018/art-of-the-blown-headline and “here”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2027/the-disappointing-new-york-times.

About That Enrichment Program

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“!/images/104.jpg!”:http://www.kedo.org/il_Reactor1.asp

_[This post has been updated to add the mention of the LWR in the April 14 statement, which I somehow overlooked.]_

In the last two months, the North Korean Foreign Ministry has had some things to say about light-water reactors and uranium enrichment.

On “April 14”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2009/200904/news14/20090414-23ee.html, the Foreign Ministry stated that “there is no need any more to have the six-party talks,” and added in that connection that the DPRK

bq. will positively examine the construction of its light water reactor power plant in order to round off the structure of the Juche-based nuclear power industry.

p. On “April 29”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2009/200904/news29/20090429-14ee.html, it was further announced that, in response to the Security Council Presidential Statement of April 13,

bq. the DPRK will make a decision to build a light water reactor power plant and start the technological development for ensuring self-production of nuclear fuel as its first process without delay.

On “June 13”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2009/200906/news13/20090613-10ee.html, in response to UNSCR 1874, it was further announced that

bq.. The process of uranium enrichment will be commenced.

Pursuant to the decision to build its own light-water reactor, enough success has been made in developing uranium enrichment technology to provide nuclear fuel to allow the experimental procedure.

p=. *Well, That Was Quick*

Actually, what’s surprising is that it took so long to hear these declarations. Readers of this blog are probably already familiar with the history of “North Korea’s uranium enrichment-related acquisition activities”:http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/assessing-north-koreas-uranium-enrichment-capabilities and the dispute surrounding them, which served as the proximate cause of the “end of the Agreed Framework”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/file_download/23. In the face of American accusations that North Korea had started a HEU-based program for weapons-making, it would have been quite easy for the North Koreans to have said, “Sure, we’re interested in uranium enrichment. We want to make our own fuel for the two LWRs you’ve “agreed to build us”:http://www.kedo.org/pdfs/SupplyAgreement.pdf. Don’t get so excited.”

This is, after all, essentially what the Iranians have done when confronted with the evidence of their own enrichment activities.

Not that anyone would have believed the North Koreans then, or believes them now. Indeed, much of the news media simply read past the LWR cover story and reported (erroneously) that North Korea had openly threatened to “start enriching uranium to make more nuclear weapons”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2038/mis-reporting-north-korea. This is an understandable mistake, as the LWR and enrichment statements were presented as gestures of defiance, offered alongside threats of an unambiguously military nuclear character.

p=. *R-E-S-P-E-C-T*

So now that the plutonium cat is out of the bag, and North Korea demands recognition as a nuclear power, why suddenly introduce the LWR fuel pretense, at long last? Why not say instead, “We’re going to make HEU for hydrogen bomb secondaries”?

As “Peter Hayes and colleagues”:http://www.nautilus.org/fora/security/0578LWR.html view it, and as “Jeff Goldstein argues”:http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/2685mu7x212h5m0q/?p=659ea961a504440cb4bc4c11baa65f4f&pi=6 in the latest issue of the _Bulletin,_ the LWR supply demand — which dates back to the Agreed Framework — is a pride thing and an assurance of respect. If the U.S. and its allies insist that North Korea give up its existing plutonium production reactor, the reasoning goes, they must compensate it with a top-of-the-line power reactor — even if it can’t plausibly make use of it thanks to the decrepitude of the DPRK power grid. During the wrangling over the “Joint Declaration” of September 2005, the North Koreans “simply insisted on LWRs before disarmament”:http://www.nautilus.org/fora/security/0578LWR.html:

bq. The U.S. should not even dream of the issue of the DPRK’s dismantlement of its nuclear deterrent before providing LWRs, a physical guarantee for confidence-building.

So it follows that the upsurge in LWR rhetoric is an assertion of self-reliance. “We’re done waiting for you. We’ll build it for ourselves!”

LWR-speak is also a hint that North Korea probably has a long way to go before it can make HEU in respectable quantities, and perhaps no foreseeable prospects at all. They’re not over-promising. In fact, they’re not promising anything externally verifiable at all, insofar as they’re almost certainly never going to be able to complete a LWR by themselves. No LWR = no obvious lack of LWR fuel.

There are other possible explanations for LWR-speak. I’ll return to this topic again later.

Tolkien’s Dwarves With a Slide Projector

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Let’s continue with our “examination of North Korean engineering”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2060/nk-engineering-rough-and-ready.

The pictures you see below strongly suggest that North Korean engineers are not primitives by any means. Moreover, when they’ve done something enough, they seem to get pretty good at it. “These and a few other shots”:http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=16186 recently appeared at the website of a Burmese dissident journal, and purport to show North Korean experts training Burmese military engineers and overseeing the construction of tunnel complexes around Naypyidaw, the new capital of Myanmar (Burma). To my eyes, at least, they convey a high level of comfort with modern technologies, and perhaps even a can-do spirit:

!/images/106.jpg!

_”A North Korean expert gives a power point presentation at the Naypyidaw meeting.”_

!/images/108.jpg!

_”Heavy construction equipment is brought in to clear a mountainside site.”_

!/images/107.jpg!

_”Surfaced roads are laid to the site.”_

(That looks like an American-made Caterpillar brand roller, doesn’t it?)

What we see here are merely the early stages. To see further progress at this or a similar site, have a look at this other Burmese dissent website, where still photos of tunneling activity have been “made into a video”:http://english.dvb.no/nkorea-news.php. From the looks of things, any paranoid regime or James Bond villain in need of a subterranean lair could do worse than to make a phone call to Pyongyang.

NK Engineering: Rough and Ready

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!/images/105.jpg!

As the wonk world “learned last week”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2362/yuras-brew, the DPRK is the proud owner of the Ushers Brewery, formerly of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England.

Mr. Peter Ward, the previous owner of said brewery, “recalled for the BBC”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8115677.stm how the North Koreans went about taking receipt of their new purchase:

bq.. “They worked extremely hard and long hours. The didn’t go out and spent most of their time in their lightweight boiler suits,” Mr Ward remembers.

“Engineering-wise, you would be turning back the clock 50 years. From a mechanical point of view they were happy to take a blow torch to it rather than dismantle a piece of plant.

“They were going to rip it up without drawings, but we helped them taking it down and marked it all up for shipping to North Korea.”

p. The middleman who arranged the deal also shed some light on how long it took them to master this new technology:

bq.. Within 18 months of shipping the plant home, the North Koreans had the brewery up and running.

Uwe Oehms, the German agent who was asked by the North Koreans to find a brewery, remembers the deal as “one of the most interesting” of his life.

Though the North Koreans had limited experience of modern technology, he bought them a series of books on the latest brewing techniques.

“Despite their lack of English I was surprised that they were learning how to do this quite well,” he recalls. “The quality of the beer was quite good in the beginning but when they couldn’t buy good foreign ingredients the quality decreased.

p. So judging by this vignette, at least, North Korean engineers — and “zymurgists”:http://www.beertown.org/homebrewing/zymurgy_magazine/index.html — lack state-of-the-art training (and that’s putting it nicely), but they’re hard workers and quick studies. With some basically solid equipment and minimal instruction, they can produce surprisingly good results. But they’re quite limited in resources and must rely on whatever foreign components and materials they can get their hands on, with potential downsides for quality control.

These observations may shed some added light, albeit obliquely, on “questions Geoff Forden has recently raised about missile production”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2370/missile-development-programs-an-alternative-view. I’ll have more to say about this subject before too long.

Update: This was really two posts, so I’ve “broken out the rest separately”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2061/tolkiens-dwarves-with-a-slide-projector.