Just before North Korea launched its first intercontinental missile in 2017, scientists strapped their newest rocket to a test stand to ascertain how it might perform. The liquid-fueled engine burned successfully for 200 seconds and generated enough thrust to propel a warhead halfway round the world.
Two years later, on Dec. 13, a replacement missile engine was lit abreast of an equivalent test stand while scientists watched. this point the burn lasted 400 seconds — almost seven minutes — consistent with a politician statement.
For analysts who closely track such tests, the results were both startling and mystifying. North Korea’s last ICBM was powerful enough to succeed in the U.S. East Coast. Was this a replacement booster for an equivalent ICBM? Or something different? nobody knew, but experts fear that the planet could soon determine.
“Seven minutes,” said one U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to debate North Korea’s capabilities, “is an extended time.”
The experiment at North Korea’s Sohae test stand — one among two at the complex within the past month — has fueled speculation about the character of the “Christmas gift” that leader Kim Jong Un promised if nuclear talks with the Trump administration remained stalled. Satellite cameras in recent weeks have spotted preparatory work on several locations where North Korea assembled or tested missiles within the past.
President Trump was dismissive Tuesday about what that gift could be. “Maybe it’s a pleasant present,” he told reporters. “Maybe it’s a gift where he sends me a gorgeous vase as against a missile test, right?”
But the recent surge in activity also appears to verify something that U.S. intelligence agencies have long suspected: Despite a self-imposed moratorium on testing its most advanced missiles over the past two years, North Korea has never halted its efforts to create powerful new weapons. Indeed, Kim’s scientists appear to possess used the lull to quietly improve and expand the country’s arsenal, U.S. and East Asian officials say.
U.S. analysts say the 2 tests at Sohae appear to reflect months of continued work on North Korea’s arsenal of potent liquid-fueled missiles, which already includes two ICBMs, the Hwasong-14 and Hwasong-15, capable of striking the us. But the country’s scientists have demonstrated progress on other forms of missiles also. within the months since the failed U.S.-North Korean summit in Vietnam, Pyongyang has tested five new short- and medium-range missiles, all of which use solid propellants. Solid-fueled missiles are more mobile and easier to cover compared with similar rockets that use liquid fuel.
One of the newly unveiled additions to North Korea’s arsenal, the KN-23, may be a highly maneuverable short-range missile that flies at low altitudes and is difficult to intercept. Another, the medium-range Pukguksong-3, are often launched from submarines.
“No one thinks they developed of these systems during a few months,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a weapons expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, in California. Satellite photos and various tests — many of them publicly announced and photographed — have shown repeatedly that “North Korea’s nuclear and missile facilities kept operating during the moratoria,” he said.
“They have built up capabilities over time,” Lewis said, “and they prefer to reveal them when it’s politically desirable.”
A demonstration of any of those technologies would be intended partially to precise frustration over the stalled nuclear talks and to prod the Trump administration into new concessions at the negotiating table. But inherent any new missile launch would be a bigger message directed at Americans themselves, experts said.
“It would be how of highlighting our vulnerability — to point out they need the range to succeed in us,” said Robert Litwak, director of international security studies at the Wilson International Center for Scholars.
The same message, delivered within the sort of back-to-back ICBM tests, helped lead the us and North Korea to the brink of crisis in 2017. Litwak said he worries that a replacement round of missile tests — or a Christmas surprise — might be the beginning of a replacement escalatory cycle, with an uncertain outcome.
A string of hints
Assuming he follows through on his threat, Kim’s choice of a Christmas present ultimately are going to be a political calculation. East Asian diplomats and a few Western analysts think he will choose something less dramatic than an ICBM launch or nuclear weapons test, to avoid completely sabotaging U.S.-North Korean negotiations and possibly damaging ties with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
In any case, Kim appears to possess numerous options, and in recent months, he has left a string of tantalizing hints.
Since the autumn, amid faltering talks with the Trump administration, U.S. satellites have monitored ongoing work on two navy shipyards where North Korea keeps special barges wont to test submarine-launched ballistic missiles, or SLBMs. Beginning in early December, there has been a spike in activity around a test barge at the Nampo shipyard near Pyongyang, suggesting that North Korea could be preparing to check a missile which will be launched stumped.
The last publicly announced test of an SLBM occurred just three months ago, when North Korea unveiled the Pukguksong-3. Launched from a submerged barge, it flew during a high arc, traveling 600 miles above Earth before splashing into the ocean. If it had flown during a normal trajectory, it might have crossed Japan’s northern islands and covered a distance of up to 1,200 miles, making it the foremost powerful solid-fueled missile built by North Korea thus far.
The test revealed substantial progress with a sort of missile that military analysts think of especially worrisome. Liquid-fueled missiles like North Korea’s Hwasong-15 generally must be filled before launch, in order that they are susceptible to being spotted beforehand by satellites or reconnaissance aircraft. But solid-fueled missiles are often hidden in bunkers or containers and launched with little warning. The solid-fueled Pukguksong-3 is meant to be fired from submarines that, by definition, are even harder to detect.
“They are clearly moving toward having a survivable deterrent,” or a capability that can’t be easily neutralized, said Victor Cha, a former adviser on North Korea to the George W. Bush White House and now a senior adviser to the middle for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think factory. “Solid propellant, SLBMs and submarines would be a method of showing that they now have such a deterrent.”
North Korea features a modest fleet of Soviet-era Romeo-class submarines, a number of which are being re-engineered to hold SLBMs. Pyongyang is also developing a line of missile-capable Sinpo-class submarines with a variety of up to 1,500 nautical miles. Some North Korea experts say Kim’s Christmas present could also be the revealing of a submarine that would launch missiles stumped all of sudden.
The SLBMs to be carried by those submarines even have undergone a big upgrade. a replacement report about the Pukguksong-3 suggests that the missile’s solid-propelled engine is greater and more capable than many experts initially thought. The study, by Middlebury’s Lewis, analyzed North Korean images to more precisely calculate the size of the new SLBM also as an earlier land-based version of an equivalent missile. The diameter was judged to be about 13 percent wider than experts previously thought, a symbol that North Korea’s engineers may have overcome a key technological barrier that limits the dimensions of solid-fueled missiles. If so, the general program could also be “at a more advanced stage than we realized,” Lewis wrote.
“We believe North Korea could conduct a primary flight-test of an intermediate- or intercontinental-range missile using solid-propellant a while in 2020,” said the analysis, consistent with a pre-publication draft obtained by The Washington Post. “We cannot predict whether such a test would achieve success.”
'A big unknown'
But the year-end gift could even be of a completely different nature — and maybe a real surprise, analysts said. North Korean scientists are chipping away at multiple technical barriers that hamper Kim’s ability to strike the us with a atomic warhead, analysts said, and therefore the communist leader may plan to showcase a breakthrough.
The two missile-engine tests at Sohae — a facility that Kim had pledged to dismantle — sparked speculation that North Korea is preparing to unveil a more powerful booster to launch satellites into space.
Other experts, citing the weird seven-minute burn time during the Dec. 13 experiment, theorized that Pyongyang is functioning on an improved reentry vehicle to take a seat atop one among the new ICBMs. to succeed in the us, the missile and its atomic warhead would need to survive intense heat as they slice into the upper atmosphere. Perhaps the North Koreans were employing a rocket engine’s fiery exhaust to simulate reentry conditions, analysts said.
Kim could also demonstrate a capability to use decoys to fool the expensive antimissile systems built by the us to intercept incoming warheads, said Vann Van Diepen, a top nonproliferation official within the Bush and Obama administrations. The decoys, called “penetration aids” or “penaids,” could include inflatable balloons or clouds of metal chaff which will confuse missile-tracking radars ashore.
The Kim regime has not yet demonstrated that it's such devices, but “it would be according to North Korea’s historical missile development philosophy to deploy a minimum of simple penaids” on its long-range missiles, Van Diepen wrote in an essay published by 38 North, an internet site that is a forum for North Korea analysts.
Even a smaller demonstration — a replacement test of 1 of North Korea’s older ICBMs, for instance — would make a political statement by breaking the self-imposed freeze. But Van Diepen said it might be an error to rule out the likelihood of other, bigger surprises if Kim resumes a lively testing program within the months ahead.
“A big unknown is what proportion technical help they got from others, but they’ve been ready to do an awful lot on their own,” he said. “There’s an entire industry of individuals who underestimated North Korea.