It’s a very bad idea. Here is why.

Today, North Korea released information to international agencies showing where it expects the first and second stages of “Unha-2”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1877/kwangmyongsong-kwangmyongsong-kwangmyongsong to fall. “Geoff Forden”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2220/dprks-stay-clear-zones has a picture. The “International Civil Aviation Organization”:http://www.icao.int/icao/en/nr/2009/pio200902_e.pdf has a more elaborate version that includes civil air routes and other details. (See the second page of the PDF.)

What this shows us is a planned launch due east over Japan, dropping the first stage in the Sea of Japan, the second stage in the Pacific.

Currently, neither Japan or the United States has any known ability to shoot down a launch vehicle as it is boosting. There are plans, but the reality is still a way off, according to “MDA”:http://www.mda.mil/mdalink/html/mdalink.html. So if an intercept is attempted, it won’t be an intercept of Unha-2 (the rocket). It will be an intercept of Kwangmyongsong-2 (the satellite), once it has already passed over Japan, perhaps when it’s already in orbit.

In the past, the United States has maintained that its own satellites are equivalent to its sovereign territory. That’s a stance that’s difficult to maintain if one doesn’t honor it oneself. So entirely apart from the “legal issues”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2214/shooting-down-dprks-satellite-launch-its-legal surrounding North Korean missile activities — and setting aside “how the NKs might react”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1897/shooting-down-north-koreas-launch — it would simply be making a very bad precedent for the U.S. to make an unprovoked attack on a foreign satellite, one that would undercut the security of the most space-dependent nation on Earth.

Let’s think about this a little before doing anything rash, OK, folks?

Will either the U.S. or Japan attempt to shoot down a North Korean satellite launch? It’s not impossible, but don’t bet on anybody doing anything quite that provocative.

The “last time such threats emanated from the U.S.”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/21/AR2006062101518.html, lo and behold, North Korea’s (failed) long-range missile launch was accompanied by a barrage of short-range and medium-range missiles, which performed just fine. Point made.

Plus, “we have enough space debris already”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1847/iridium-cosmos, don’t we?

Oddly, the following item sourced to the “KCNA website”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/ is not yet there, [Update: “here it is”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2009/200903/news09/20090309-02ee.html] but it’s popped up “elsewhere online”:http://www.individual.com/story.php?story=97486636 and is worth careful study, as it does not read quite like the usual KCNA drivel:

In view of the prevailing grave situation the General Staff of the KPA solemnly declares as follows in order to protect the supreme interests of the country and the nation from the war maniacs’ reckless moves for aggression against the DPRK:

1. Our revolutionary armed forces will counter the enemies’ any slight hostile acts of violating the sovereignty of the country and intruding into its inviolable territory, territorial waters and territorial air with prompt merciless military actions.

It is the invariable stand of our revolutionary armed forces fully ready for all-out confrontation not to allow any enemies to intrude into our territory, territorial waters and territorial air even 0.001 mm.

2. We will retaliate any act of intercepting our satellite for peaceful purposes with prompt counter strikes by the most powerful military means.

If the enemies recklessly opt for intercepting our satellite, our revolutionary armed forces will launch without hesitation a just retaliatory strike operation not only against all the interceptor means involved but against the strongholds of the US and Japanese aggressors and the South Korean puppets who hatched plots to intercept it.

Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war.

3. As an immediate measure we will enforce a more strict military control and cut off the North-South military communications in order to guarantee the security in the opened Eastern and Western coastal areas under the control of the North and the South while the DPRK-targeted war exercises are under way.

It is nonsensical to maintain normal communications channel at a time when the South Korean puppets are getting frantic with the above-said war exercises, levelling guns at fellow countrymen in league with foreign forces.

Accordingly, our army will cut off the military communications, the last channel which has existed between the North and the South, from March 9.

Even if you think there’s no more than a 10% chance of retaliation, would you risk it? it just doesn’t seem remotely worth making whatever point would be made by destroying a primitive satellite.

Instead of a musical bonus, here’s an apt (if dated) comment on the “infamous op-ed”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/21/AR2006062101518.html linked above.

Enjoy.

!/images/70.gif!

Earlier, I quoted a 2006 article by Daniel Sneider on the “origins of North Korea’s SS-N-6 clone”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1851/pointing-fingers-at-russia, the so-called “Musudan missile”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1500/nork-irbm-musudan-1.

Like “Nodong” and “Taepodong,” “Musudan” is the name of a village close to the “Musudan-ri launch site”:http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/dprk/nodong.htm, lately also known as the “Tonghae Satellite Launching Ground”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1877/kwangmyongsong-kwangmyongsong-kwangmyongsong. The U.S. intelligence community seems to issue these geographic names after the first sighting of each missile in question.

Over at ACW, the knowledgeable Allen Thomson sounds “a skeptical note”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2203/unhataepodong-test-imminent#c010602:

I agree about the Nodong and Taepodong, but it’s not clear to me that the “Musudan” missile designation came out of the usual USIC naming process. Mostly because I’m still not convinced that the Musudan/BM-25/SS-N-6/R27 story isn’t a fable. Maybe the thing is real and maybe it, or its engine, were tested at Musudan-ri. But I’m not betting money on it.

I know what he means. There’s still no strong evidence to support the stories in the “NY Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/02/international/middleeast/02iran.html or the German tabloid _Bild_ (headline: _Irans Raketen reichen bald bis Berlin!_) that placed 18 Russian-designed IRBMs from North Korea in Iran. (If the number 18 sounds familiar, that’s also how many KH-55 cruise missiles were reported smuggled from Ukraine to China and Iran.)

_Update: I’ve just remembered an “article from mid-2006”:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115212320912498575-search.html in the_ Wall Street Journal _claiming that Musudan missiles reached Iran by sea in late 2005. Judge for yourself._

But the intelligence community clearly believes that the missile exists in North Korea. See page 10 of this “2006 NASIC report”:http://www.nukestrat.com/us/afn/NASIC2006.pdf, titled “MRBM and IRBM Characteristics.” It includes the following info, listed right after the No Dong and the Taepo Dong I:

Missile: IRBM****
Country: North Korea
Number of Stages: 1
Propellant: Liquid
Deployment Mode: Mobile
Maximum Range (miles): 2,000+
Number of Launchers: Not yet deployed

****Missile has not yet been flight-tested.

That’s our Musudan.

Why the missile was still nameless in 2006 is anybody’s guess. In September 2003, Lee Chul-hee of _Joongang Ilbo_, a Seoul newspaper, reported a sighting _en plein air_:

North Korea has deployed new intermediate range ballistic missiles capable of reaching key U.S. military posts, South Korean intelligence sources said yesterday.

The sources said the new missiles appeared recently at an air force base near the capital of Pyeongyang.

North Korea is expected to unveil the weapons publicly at its 55th founding anniversary parade today.

The missiles are believed to be modified from Soviet-era weapons.

“The missiles were deployed at the Mirim Airdrome, probably to display them at the military parade,” said a South Korean military intelligence official on condition of anonymity. Five launch pads and about 10 missiles were detected at the air base, he said.

Intelligence officials in Japan, South Korea and the United States have inferred from the unique shape of the missile’s warhead – which resembles the top of a baby bottle – that the North’s version was developed based on the Soviet-designed, submarine-launched SS-N-6.

In the end, the missiles did not join the parade. But a nameless “U.S. official” told Sonni Efron of the _LA Times_:

“We’ve had hints of this for several years, but it’s only within the last year that we’ve been able to confirm that this did exist and it’s derived from Russian technology,” the official said, adding that the development “makes you wonder what else they might have been able to access” during that period.

Some guy named “Paul Kerr”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_09/NK_Missile also wrote about this.

Since NASIC’s 2006 report said it was not “flight-tested,” and it’s not called “Mirim” or “Pyongyang” in the open-source reporting, I’m guessing that Allen’s speculation about an engine test at Musudan-ri is about right.

According to “KCNA”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2009/200902/news24/20090224-06ee.html:

The preparations for launching experimental communications satellite Kwangmyongsong-2 by means of delivery rocket Unha-2 are now making brisk headway at Tonghae Satellite Launching Ground in Hwadae County, North Hamgyong Province.

“FCNL”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2190/fun-with-fcnl, call your office.

Back in a previous blogging existence, I observed that “nobody is attributing new developments in Iranian missile technology to Russia”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2013/irans-ashura-missile-mystery — at least, not yet.

Now the inevitable seems to have begun, deep in one of the recent “comment marathons”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2181/why-would-a-2-stage-safir-be-surprising#comment at ACW:

I can’t help but wonder if this all isn’t about “more modern materials, tools and computing power”, but rather “expert russian rocket scientists working in their iranian-financed north-korean exile-design-bureau on improving ancient soviet technology secretly provided by modern-day russia”…

Those in the know will recognize this as an idea associated with “Robert Schmucker”:http://www.schmucker.de/, a Munich-based technology consultant and entrepreneur. Schmucker maintains that the Nodong/Shihab-3/Ghauri missile is actually a heretofore unknown device of Soviet vintage, with the designs and engineering provided to North Korea by corrupt and enterprising Russians. The AQ Khanski network, as it were.

(See the 17th slide of this “Schmucker briefing”:http://www.prif.org/fileadmin/content-ABM/schmucker.pdf for an instance of this claim.)

Although wrong, this idea is certainly intriguing and not as ridiculous as it might seem. Here is why. “Daniel Sneider”:http://fsi.stanford.edu/people/danielcsneider/ wrote in the San Jose Mercury News of July 25, 2006:

I encountered one crucial tentacle of Kim’s program some 14 years ago, in late October of 1992.

A group of 64 Russian rocket scientists, accompanied by their wives and children, were stopped just as they were about to board a flight to North Korea. The scientists were employees of a super-secret facility in the Urals, the V.P. Makeyev Design Bureau, responsible for the development of the Soviet Union’s submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

As the bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor, I pieced the story together later from Russian press accounts and interviews with the scientists and others. A middleman with apparent official backing had offered the bureau, starving for orders and left adrift by the sudden end of the Cold War, work in North Korea.

Scientists who were making the equivalent of $15 a month jumped at offers of up to $4,000 a month to help a former Soviet ally. In the spring, a group of 10 scientists had gone for an initial foray. The Koreans, one of the scientists told me, initially never directly asked about nuclear warheads or missile designs. They claimed only to be interested in rocket science.

The Russians came home that fall and signed up dozens of their comrades as recruits. But the project was not officially sanctioned, and the KGB held them outside of Moscow for two months while the broker tried to re-negotiate their departure. Russian officials later described the North Koreans’ aim, without mentioning them by name, as an attempt to build “combat missile complexes that could carry nuclear weapons.”

North Korea began with copies of Soviet short-range Scud missiles and moved on to medium-range “Nodong” missiles, but they lacked the range and accuracy to meet Kim’s target. A decade after the airport incident, in 2003, credible reports emerged that the North Koreans were deploying a new, far more accurate missile based on the Soviet SS-N-6, a submarine-launched rocket developed by Makeyev in the 1960s. The Nodong-2, as some labeled it, could reach all U.S. bases in Japan and possibly even to Guam.

Now, there are just a couple of problems with extending the SS-N-6 paradigm to the Nodong.

First, the “work on the Nodong goes back to the late 1980s”:http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/NK/Missile/65_681.html, before the collapse of the Soviet Union set in motion the dynamics described by Sneider.

Second, the Soviet precursor to the Nodong doesn’t exist. It’s a figment.

Applying the same kind of reasoning to Iran’s new generation of post-Scud, post-Nodong space launchers/ballistic missiles is still more problematic, since these devices “don’t seem to exist in North Korea”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2013/irans-ashura-missile-mystery, where the nefarious Khanski Gang is supposedly at work.

Here’s a different idea: if there are indications of Russian technology in the Iranian missile program, it’s because “the Iranians had considerable access to Russian expertise and training in the 1990s”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/1998_03/rusiran — not because devices were transferred to them lock, stock, and barrel.

I hesitate to say it, but there does still seem to be some resistance out there to the idea that anyone not severely melatonin melanin-challenged can work with sophisticated technologies…

Just saying.