ArmsControlWonk

DPRK: Launch in One Month

geoffrey_forden — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:43:40 GMT

click on the image for a larger version

Timeline of the 5 April 2009 U’nha-2 Launch

Ok, so I don’t have the amount of confidence in my prediction as the title seems to indicate. But everybody else is making blanket statements so why can’t I?

After returning from the Mid-East on Thursday, I had to catch up quickly on what was going on with North Korea’s missile/rocket program. My post wondering where the launch notification was represents my first attempt to catch up on the DPRK’s activities, after thinking exclusively about Iran for the last two weeks. I’m really uncertain why July 4th was picked up by so many people as the expected launch date. It seems just too soon (I’m talking here about the practical arrangements, not the time necessary to diagnose what went wrong with the last launch and correct it, which is also too short!) and, as far as I can tell, there was absolutely no sighting of the rocket on either launch pad.

Taking a look at the timeline, as determined by various milestones of the previous U’nha-2 launch as reported in the media, indicates it takes about two months to move the rocket to the launch site, assemble it horizontally in an assembly building, erect it on the launch pad, fuel it and wait for good weather to launch. That includes about three weeks warning time North Korea gave by filing a launch notification with international organizations. If we (naively) assume the same amount of time, then they should launch in early August. That assumes the June 1st initial indication of launch preparations (shipping large cylindrical objects by train) that I found was the first one published. It also assumes that intelligence agencies and media organizations are just as efficient as publishing the information as they were the last time. Furthermore, it assumes that North Korea does not need to make any long term preparations that might have been performed for the last launch before the preparations were spotted by the West.

If all of this is true, the first indication should be DPRK’s filing a notification of stay clear zones, probably in about a week. If that happens, everything will be on target for a launch during the first week in August.

Of course, given all these assumptions, I could be proved wrong any day now!

DPRK: Selective treaty compliance? [4]

geoffrey_forden — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:17:54 GMT

North Korea is expected by just about everyone to launch at least one (and possibly two?) large missiles/rockets this weekend. And yet, they do not seem to have filed a warning to mariners and airmen notification with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). This is something they seemed to have been very proud to do over three weeks before the April 5th launch. What’s going on? Have they abandoned their adherence to the Outer Space Treaty already? Or are they just not as far along in their preparations for these (this) launch(es) as they are being given credit for?

A.Q. Khan and Samar Mubarakmand [3]

michael_krepon — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:38:08 GMT

AQ Khan and Samar Mubarakmand, flanking the man in the blue beret (believed to be General Zulfikar Ali). Reproduced from the Nuclear Weapons Archive.

A.Q. Khan is easily the most famous person associated with Pakistan’s nuclear program. By fostering the image of being the “father” of Pakistan’s Bomb, he gained public acclaim and the protection of the state — even after his entrepreneurial activities seriously weakened Pakistan’s national security and caused great embarrassment. How much Khan was freelancing, and how much he was operating under high-level guidance, will remain very murky.

Khan contributed significantly to Pakistan’s bomb program by spiriting out of Holland designs to manufacture centrifuges, and by setting up a Uranium enrichment plant at Kahuta. But A.Q. Khan was hardly the brightest light in Pakistan’s nuclear firmament. This distinction may belong to someone little known in the West: Dr. Samar Mubarakmand. Let’s open the shoe box files to learn more about Mubarakmand.

He joined the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission in 1962, which sent him to Oxford to receive a doctorate in physics. A.Q. Khan enriched uranium (and himself); Mubarakmand had more consequential assignments. Beginning in 1983, He conducted the first and subsequent “cold tests” of Pakistan’s bomb designs. He was also the man in charge at Chagai when Pakistan tested those designs in 1998. Mubarakmand was additionally responsible for developing and producing Pakistan’s solid-fuel missiles.

Samar Mubarakmand has avoided the spotlight as much as A.Q. Khan welcomed it. A while back, Scott Sagan passed along to me transcripts of two of Mubarakmand’s rare public addresses that shed light on his contributions to Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programs. These transcripts also suggest that he and A.Q. Khan are not the best of friends.

Here are some excerpts from Mubarakmand’s speech to the Khwarzimic Science Society in Lahore, delivered on November 30, 1998 (full text), when the dust was still settling after the Chagai tests:

The true father of the Pakistani nuclear program was Dr. Rafi Muhammad Chaudhary. He migrated to Pakistan from Aligarh University and established the Physics Department at the Government College Lahore.

The PAEC (Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission) was told that whenever you were ready, you would detonate a bomb. So we were all very enthusiastic. We were running day and night concentrating on our effort. But…the mandate was withdrawn from us when we were ready.

On the morning of the 11th of May [1998], one of our friends, in the Armed Services, phoned me and said, “Have you heard the news today?” I said, “What?” He said, “The Indians have conducted the explosion in Pokhran.” So I said, “Congratulations.” I was genuinely happy. He said, “You are congratulating us on the Indian tests?” I said, “Yes, because now we would get a chance to do our own tests.

The PAEC… is an island of excellence… Our life expectancy is 122nd in the world; in the literacy rate, we are the 162nd, and in per capita income we are the 122nd. The access to health services gives us a ranking of 148, and in clear drinking water we are 114th in the world… In nuclear weapons, we are the 7th in the world.

Nobody works in our organization for money or fame. We do not believe that sensitive work can be done by publicizing it. It should be done quietly, and so there is no lust for fame in this organization. There is honesty, dedication.

I can tell you this – the miracle of teamwork I saw in Chagai. We were there for about 10 days. The PM (Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif) had told me, “Dr. Sahib, please do not fail, we cannot afford to fail. IF WE FAIL, WE CANNOT SURVIVE. (Emphasis in prepared remarks.) This is an hour of crisis for Pakistan.” He was dead sure that if we failed, they would have attacked our nuclear facilities.

Mubarakmand also gave a rare, extended interview on Pakistan’s GEO-TV on March 20, 2007 in which he inferentially compared his contributions to Pakistan’s nuclear programs with those of A.Q. Khan:

I visited Chagai for the first time in 1981… When the tests were conducted, our team went there on 20th May, and on 28th May, in the early morning, the tunnels were plugged and the preparation for the test was complete, and on 28th May, around 3pm, was the time selected for testing. So at that time, at around 2:45pm, some of our guests arrived to witness the tests, and Dr. Qadeer Khan sahib was also one of them… It was the first visit of his life to Chagai. He came at the invitation of the Chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and he arrived 15 minutes prior to the explosions.”

Missile Development Consortiums [23]

geoffrey_forden — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:40:15 GMT

At left, is an Iranian numerically controlled ~~lathe~~ milling machine forming cooling channels in a rocket engine.

It is impossible to tell the scale of this engine — and therefore impossible to uniquely link it to the Safir second stage.

However, machining these channels, as opposed to using a corrugated insert, is a major technological change from SCUD technology.

***

David Wright and Ted Postol have done a really first rate job of analyzing the U’nha-2 and Safir development programs, as exemplified by their excellent article on the U’nha-2. But I think it is important to at least consider an alternative: these missiles represent a much larger portion of indigenous production than just assembling components. This is not to say that Wright and Postol are wrong in their conclusions, only to consider the question.

An International Missile Development Consortium?

North Korea is widely viewed as not testing their missiles enough before they sell them to “client” states. The Nodong missile, which forms the basis for the Shahab-3 and its variants, was tested successfully just once before “being sold to Iran and Pakistan.” This is an unreasonable flight test program and has led many to conjecture that North Korea is either buying complete missiles from Russia, missiles already engineered and developed, or missile components. That could, of course, be very possible and has unfortunate implications for the West’s relationship with Russia. Another alternative of this basic idea, just a small variant really, is that North Korea bought the production line for an obsolete or canceled missile system and modified it to fit its own special circumstances. With this head start, it then formed an international “consortium” with Iran and possibly Pakistan to continue the development. Moving its development program into other countries would have significant advantages for North Korea. For one, while Iranian missile launches are controversial, they do not appear as controversial as the DPRK’s missile tests. This is even more true for Pakistan where any controversy is mainly a regional one.

Such a development consortium would not be the first one ever created. The one I am most familiar with is the Badr 2000/Condor II development program where Iraq, in essence, funded the development of the missile by several other nations. Iraq received a number of contributory production plants that increased their capabilities considerably while failing to produce the desired missile. If North Korea bought the equipment for an obsolete or canceled production line, this would undoubtedly violate many of the rules of the MTCR but might not be as suspicious a violation, especially in a country suffering from the economic catastrophe that was Russia in the 1990s, as selling missile components. After all, most of the equipment could be considered dual use and could appear in separate manifests etc. All the subterfuges proliferation profiteers have used in the past. Importantly, it is much, much easier to reverse engineer a production line than it is to reverse engineer a missile component. After all, once you know the production line components, it is quite easy to buy similar or even exactly the same production equipment else where. The difficulty in reverse engineering is to infer the production scheme.

Too Advanced for Purchasing Production Lines?

An Iranian welding the Shahab engine injection head.
This illustrates the shop-floor know-how that is so
important — and so hard to acquire.

If this happened for the Nodong missile, is it possible it could also happen for an SS-N-6? In fact, it seems even more likely to me that it would happen for these more advanced missile components. The world is full of SA-2 engines, as Iraq showed by purchasing these engines in late 2002 ( see UNMOVIC’s Compendium, volume IV, p. 581.) The closer they get to strategic weapons, the more they come under the control of various treaties. (I’m not sure if SS-N-6 missiles ever came under any of the START etc. treaties, do any of you wonk-readers know?) It is possible that makes them harder to illicitly dispose of. It makes their production lines, however, that much more valuable.

( See my posting on estimating the costs of just the know-how associated with the Badr-2000. That alone was worth $75 million.)

What Proliferators Want

Proliferators, just as would-be producers of civilian products, want access to the technology and they are very seldom satisfied with just components. In fact, the financial inducements needed to entice developing countries into foregoing civilian technology transfer have to be considerable. It seems unreasonable that both Iran and North Korea would voluntarily put themselves into the situation David and Ted suggest, that they only have a finite number of components, and make themselves susceptible to the types of international restrictions that would eventually shut off their missile programs.

Piers Millett at New America

jeffrey — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:25:01 GMT

The first time I met Piers Millett, we were having a drink at Mr. Pickwick Pub in Geneva.

Now, Piers — one of only three members of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) Implementation Support Unit in Geneva — is in town.

Long-time readers know one of my hobby horses is the fact that the policy community obsesses about phantom BW programs at the expense of international cooperation to fight the spread of virulent influenza. Someday, a lot of people are going to suffer for this particular sin.

Anyway, along with my friend Paul Walker at Global Green USA, I am hosting a talk and a wine reception for Piers here at the New America Foundation:

Strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention
Discussion and Wine Reception

Unlike the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) has no mechanism to ensure compliance and verification.

Given the dramatic advances in the life sciences over the past decade, the international community urgently needs to discuss strengthening the BWC.

Join the New America Foundation and Global Green USA as Piers Millett, one of the three experts from the BWC Implementation Support Unit in Geneva, and Paul Walker, president of Global Green USA, discuss how best to combat bioterrorism and the spread of bioweapons
.
Start: 07/08/2009 – 3:30pm
End: 07/08/2009 – 6:00pm
New America Foundation
1899 L Street NW Suite 400
Washington, 20036
United States
See map: Google Maps

RSVP

Participants
Featured Speakers
Dr. Piers Millett
Political Affairs Officer
Biological Weapons Convention Implementation Support Unit

Dr. Paul Walker
Director, Security and Sustainability
Global Green USA

Moderator
Dr. Jeffrey Lewis
Director, Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative
New America Foundation
Publisher, ArmsControlWonk.com

Please come and join us. RSVP here.

Yinhe Revisted

jeffrey — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:02:37 GMT

James collected a couple of articles on Yinhe incident for an October 2008 post entitled, The Yinhe Incident.

Worth revisiting.

Institutional Memory [4]

joshua_pollack — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:51:21 GMT

According to David Sanger in the NYT, some folks in the Administration are thinking very carefully about the intelligence problem in interdiction:

Pentagon officials are clearly not eager to confront the Kang Nam 1. The intelligence about what is on board is typically murky. Some say they suspect small arms, which are banned by the United Nations resolution but hardly a major threat. Members of Mr. Obama’s team who served in the Clinton administration remember past embarrassments, including the interception of a Chinese ship suspected of carrying chemical precursors in the early 1990s. When the ship was finally cornered, the cargo turned out to be benign.

That’s the Yinhe incident, for those of you keeping score at home.

X-posted from TW.

Postol and Wright on the Unha-2 [8]

jeffrey — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:43:26 GMT

A couple weeks ago, Benn Tannenbaum invited Ted Postol to come down to Washington. Ted gave a fascinating talk, in which he argued that the second stage of the Unha may be a re-purposed SS-N-6.

This is a plausible answer to the BM-25 — the North Korean bought kits to use as a second stage of the Taepodong series.

David Wright and Ted have a provocative article in the Bulletin suggesting that the Unha-2 “second stage appears identical to the single-stage Soviet R-27 sea-launched ballistic missile, called the SS-N-6 in the United States, which the Soviet Union first deployed in 1968.”

First the bad news: An SS-N-6 second stage massively increases the range-payload curve (doing away with the golf ball of death), putting CONUS within range of a 1 ton payload from North Korea.

Now, the good news: North Korea can’t indigenously manufacture the second stage, so if we can secure the rest of the SS-N-6 ~~kits~~ components (and cut off external assistance), the North Korea ICBM program is at a technological dead-end:

Analysis of the Taepodong-1 and Unha-2 launchers strongly suggests that they may be designed and built around components of Soviet missiles. The apparent lack of testing of these components by North Korea suggests that they aren’t indigenously produced systems but are existing components that North Korea has been able to combine to build multistage launchers. The Taepodong-1 appears to have used a modified Nodong missile for the first stage; a modified engine from a Soviet surface-to-air missile for the second stage; and the engine from a solid-fueled Soviet SS-21 tactical missile for the third stage. As noted above, the second stage of the Unha-2 appears to be a modified SS-N-6 missile, which was produced by the Makeyev bureau in the 1960s.

It’s possible that North Korea learned, with significant Russian assistance, to manufacture Scuds and Nodongs and is therefore not limited in its number of these missiles, assuming it can acquire the necessary materials. But this is much less likely for the SS-N-6, which is a far more advanced system due to its use of highly optimized rocket motors, very energetic propellant, and a complex airframe fabricated from aluminum alloy.

None of this evidence is conclusive, but because it has important policy implications, it should be a high priority for the United States to assess it and work with Russia to determine what technical assistance and components North Korea may have received.

Operation Gunnerside [2]

jeffrey — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:36:24 GMT

Many nuclear experts recently gathered in Oslo for an event on nuclear disarmament, organized by the Nobel Institute.

Bruno Tertrais, attendee and friend of wonk, sends along this photo of what, for him, was the highlight of the meeting: A talk by Joachim Rønneberg, “who, in addition to bearing a slight resemblance to Clint Eastwood (and is now 90), was the first successful counter-proliferator in history. He led the Norwegian team that conducted Operation Gunnerside, the sabotaging of the Nazi-occupied Norwegian heavy water plant in February 1943.”

Bruno might think Rønneberg looks like Clint Eastwood, but Kirk Douglas (right) played the Rønneberg character in The Heroes of Telemark.

Of course, Kirk is also father of Michael, no slouch when it comes to acting himself, who fights proliferation in his capacity as Ploughshares Board Member.

Bruno did not ask whether any of Rønneberg’s descendants were available for a short visit to Arak — no visa required.

What Does Natanz Cost? [5]

geoffrey_forden — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:34:05 GMT

Iran is obviously investing a lot of its political, intellectual, and financial resources into the Natanz enrichment center. But can we come up with a figure for how much it has cost Iran? Perhaps we can estimate it based on costs associated with Western equivalents. I have attempted to do this below. The result is simply a ballpark figure and I should warning you that making budget estimates, just as making sausages, is not a pretty sight!

Warning: What follows might not be suitable reading for the infirm or small children!

Centrifuge Production Know-how…$75 million
Industrial know-how, the techniques actually used by the shop-floor workers, is vitally important for the successful production of any sophisticated item. Unfortunately, it is determined by how much the market will bear. How then should we estimate it? I decided to look at how much Iraq paid (or, rather, was willing to pay) for the know-how to build an advanced solid-propellant missile, the Badr-2000 (aka the Condor II). This know-how cost is explicitly stipulated in the contract Iraq signed with its supplier state: $75 M, after correcting for inflation. It could be argued that Iran might be willing to pay considerably more for the know-how for centrifuge production but any such guess would be just that. (This, as I warned you, is the ugly part.)

Construction of the underground facility…$55 million
ISIS has done a great job in following the construction of the Natanz facility using satellite reconnaissance. Assuming that the holes dug for the “cut-and-cover” enrichment halls are 25 meters deep, then the excavation costs (at $3 per cubic yard) is $7 M. The concrete, at $70/cubic yard, (and assuming floors, ceiling, and walls are 2 meters thick), is then $37 M. Those do not add up to the $55 M but if you assume a 50% “penalty” for working in a desert, then that’s what you get. (Again, ugly.)

Centrifuge production…$140 million
Given that Iran bought the know-how and initial production lines (production equipment not included, ugly!), I am only estimating the cost per centrifuge here. That comes from the cost per centrifuge for URENCO centrifuges as being leased to France. (Ugly, ugly! Let me be clear before somebody takes offense: when I say ugly, I mean my method of estimating is ugly.) You could argue that URENCO centrifuges are more sophisticated and therefore should cost more. Or you could argue that cost is determined by the relative level of sophistication of the production line compared to the past experience of the producer. (That’s what I assume; ugly, ugly, ugly!) I then get a per centrifuge cost of $20,000. Seven thousand of them therefore means a total of $140 M. The one thing that does not make sense is to cost them per SWU; manufacturers produce centrifuges not SWUs.

Grand total cost = $270 million and counting