North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs: Foreign absorption and domestic innovation

ABSTRACT

North Korea’s strategic weapons innovation system is exemplary of an authoritarian mobilization model. The top leadership prioritizes the program and mobilizes the country’s science, technology, and heavy industrial resources around key programs. Key to success are investments in a defense industrial infrastructure that runs from basic research and development to applied R&D, product development, and linked production capability. Although foreign borrowing is important, the country’s nuclear and missile programs would not have gelled in the absence of complementary domestic investments.

KEYWORDS:

• North Korea
• defense innovation
• weapons
• international relations
• technology

The international community has consistently underestimated North Korean nuclear and missile capabilities. How has an economically impoverished, technologically backward, and internationally isolated state been able to establish robust and increasingly competent nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs? Has the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) achieved this on its own, as it proudly claims, or has it been predominantly reliant on foreign sources and if so to whom and in what ways?

This essay synthesizes what we know about the development of North Korean nuclear and missile capabilities, which together makes up the country’s strategic weapons complex. In the typology of defense innovation eco-systems presented in the introductory essay to this volume, the North Korean strategic weapons complex is a rapidly catching up regime that has made concerted progress over the past two decades in moving up the innovation ladder. This highly secretive apparatus is the most technologically advanced, innovative and privileged segment of the North Korean national economy.

The security challenges that North Korea faces – some of its own making – have clearly been important motives in the regime’s pursuit of a nuclear capability as have blackmail or pecuniary motives. We focus here, however, not on these well-known dynamics but on the input, institutional, and organizational factors that have facilitated the adaptation of foreign technologies. As with other developing countries with nuclear ambitions – from Pakistan and India, to Libya, Iraq and Syria – nuclear and missile development rests on importing, absorbing and developing preexisting stocks of foreign technology. This activity is not always considered ‘true’ innovation. But this judgment is misleading as it has been a key component of economic latecomers more generally. Successful emulation ultimately rests on the development of complementary local capabilities, and that capability varies: Pakistan and India clearly exhibit superior capacity in this regard than Libya and Iraq. The case of North Korea is interesting precisely because it combines a surprisingly low level of economic development with rapid technological advance.

What role did foreign sources play in this process? It is often thought that official support from the Soviet Union/Russia and/or China was instrumental, and there are points at which these relationships proved crucial. Yet the record also suggests that these two patrons were wary of North Korean ambitions, and that their assistance was indirect or achieved only through unofficial or even illicit channels of transfer that were outside the control of the country’s two main patrons, including not only Iran and Pakistan but through aggressive use of open sources of information as well.

The central point of this essay is that the effectiveness of North Korea’s strategic weapons innovation system ultimately rests on the steady accretion of domestic capabilities under what we call an authoritarian mobilization model. This is a highly centralized, state-led and top-down ‘big engineering’ approach that consists of the following core elements:

• The top leadership prioritizes the program, and the state mobilizes and concentrates the country’s science, technology, and heavy industrial resources on a select – but in North Korea’s case an ever-widening–number of programs.

• The regime invests in a wide-ranging defense industrial infrastructure that runs from basic research and development (R&D) to applied R&D, product development, testing, linked industries devoted to the production of relevant inputs, manufacture of components and subassemblies and final output.

• The leadership simultaneously places priority on research institutions and trading entities tasked with securing technology and needed inputs from abroad through both official, informal and illicit channels.

One of the core messages of the essay is that as a result of this strategy, the barriers to dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program are substantial, and not only because of the perennial bargaining problems that confront any such effort. The North Korean military-industrial complex is not only incredibly large but has become a political mainstay of the regime. It enjoys an increasingly privileged status and representation at the highest levels of the state, party and military apparatuses, and its accomplishments are consistently used to legitimize the regime politically.

The analysis will proceed in four steps, beginning with a brief overview of the current institutional structure in which the programs are embedded and some estimates of their size in the Kim Jong Un era. We then turn to the nuclear program and missile programs respectively, tracing exemplary developments of the catch-up model. Our purpose is not a contemporary assessment of capabilities but rather a demonstration of the long arc of North Korea’s efforts and their deeper strategic and institutional implications.

The current institutional structure

How decisions actually get made in North Korea remains opaque. Yet two features of the system are imminently clear. First, it has been highly centralized around the three Kims – Kim Il Sung (1948–1994), Kim Jong Il (1994–2011) and Kim Jong Un (2011-present) – who, outside of brief transitional periods, have typically held the top positions in the party, the state apparatus and the military. Centralization of power facilitates the ability to prioritize and coordinate activity across institutions that may be located in the party, state or military. Second, the system is state socialist, meaning that all units involved in the research, development, production and operation of the defense-industrial complex fall under the direct control of the party-state. The principal-agent problems and potential inefficiencies of such command-and-control systems are well-known, but as the Soviet and Chinese innovation systems show, they can effectively mobilize organizational resources around particular tasks.

While the system looks hierarchical, however, it is at the same time highly personalist. Informal networks play a key role: ad hoc special committees, leading small groups, and on-the-spot guidance tours that bring together top members of the political and military leadership and the scientitic, technical and industrial infrastructure. In addition, key officials often occupy multiple overlapping roles. A consideration of the career of Gen. Ri Pyong Chol provides insight into these networks. Nominally a retired air force officer, Ri has held a number of important party and state posts related to military and defense industrial affairs. They include as a senior deputy department director (presumably of the Munitions Industry Department) of the Korean Workers Party (KWP) Central Committee, which ultimately oversees the ballistic missiles program, and memberships of the KWP’s Central Military Commission and National Defense Commission under Kim Jong Il. In 2020, Ri was promoted to the KWP Politburo Presidium – the pinnacle of party power – to vice chairmanship of the Central Military Commission, and to the rank of Marshal of the KPA. He also is a KWP vice chairman and a member of Kim Jong Un’s Executive Policy Council (政務局), the body from which he formally rules. He simultaneously serves as the director of the Munitions Industry Dept, also known as the Machine-Building Industry Department and is a top member of key state bodies as well, including the State Affairs Commission and the Supreme People’s Assembly. As Ri’s career and appointments show, leadership at the top fuses party, state, and military leadership positions.

Figure 1 reproduces an attempt to outline the formal organization of the nuclear infrastructure as of 2017,¹ and shows how elements of the program are spread across state, party and military institutions. In our view, Bermudez wrongly situates Kim Jong Un’s authority as arising from his position on the State Affairs Commission and underplays the central role of the party; in all Communist systems, the party dominates the state and military and in any case Kim Jong Un sits at the apex of all three. Yet the diagram is nonetheless useful in showing the sprawling nature of the nuclear weapons complex.

Figure 1. North Korea’s nuclear weapons infrastructure.

Figure 2. North Korea’s ballistic missile research and development system.

On the left are several key state institutions: supporting ministries that fall under the Cabinet, such as the Ministries of Chemical Industry and Extractive Industry that provide relevant inputs (for example, reprocessing technology and uranium). The Ministry of Atomic Energy Industry has in various iterations acted as the external face of the program since formed in 1986. The State Academy of Sciences is involved in both basic and applied R&D, and is responsible for training scientists, technicians and support personnel. It also oversees the science departments in the major universities that are also effectively instruments of the program and even run some production facilities.

However, the party is the dominant institution and a second important cluster of bodies fall directly under it. Most notable in this regard is the Munitions Industry Department, below which sit the Nuclear Bureau, Nuclear Weapons Institute, the Academy of National Defense Sciences – specifically devoted to weapons-related research–and the all-important Second Economic Committee, which oversees the defense-industrial complex. A sign of the significance of the Second Economic Committee – and of the coalitional foundation of the regime–is that its chair was a member of the National Defense Commission under Kim Jong Il, the remainder of which was made up entirely of high-ranking military and internal security personnel.² The 4^th and 5^th General Bureau of the Second Economic Committee are devoted to the missile and nuclear industries respectively, and thus sit atop a network of production facilities associated with those two programs. The Second Economic Committee also has an External Economy Department that was in charge both of missile sales during their heyday and has been involved in both the sale and procurement of relevant inputs.

Finally there is the military and security apparatus itself – again, subordinate to the party through the Central Military Commission as much as the Ministry of State Security–including the Strategic Rocket Forces Command. Although we cannot assess their influence with great confidence, these end-users do not appear to have played a central role in the development of strategic weapons capabilities, suggesting that the innovation system is ‘technology push’ rather than ‘military pull’ in nature.

The organization of the missile program shows some significant overlap with the organization of the nuclear infrastructure just described, but a few differences are worth underlining. First, the missile program rests on a different set of research institutes that are primarily under the Academy of National Defense Sciences (also known in the past as the Second Academy of Natural Sciences). Second, the missile program involves an ongoing manufacturing component and the entire complex of work units that provide inputs to it as we will see. But these differences are less significant than the fundamentally hierarchical nature of the weapons complexes and the capacity of the top leadership to direct the entirety of the research, development and production supply chains.

How large is this infrastructure? With respect to the nuclear program, Bermudez³ argues for a range of 100–150 ‘entities’ and 9,000–15,000 personnel directly involved in the research, development, testing or production of nuclear weapons. The size of the missile infrastructure is much harder to gauge because of the manifold linkages with a variety of heavy industries noted above. South Korean media reports and articles by defecting North Korean missile researchers indicate that there are around 50 research institutes within the missile complex. The most important of these provide a sense of the reach of the complex: the No.120 (electrical engineering), No.122 (mechanical engineering), No.130 (precision machinery), No.144 (metallurgical engineering), No.166 (rocket R&D), and No.185 (electronic engineering) institutes. Yet the scope of actual production facilities is larger still and include linkages to other heavy industries: steel, non-ferrous metals, machine tools, electronics, chemicals and even automotive vehicles (for example, modified trucks for transporter-erector launchers) and shipbuilding (for the growing submarine fleet). If we narrow our metric to the dedicated missile research, development, and engineering community it is estimated to number around 15,000 personnel, of which around 3,000 are believed to be scientists and engineers.⁴

The growing significance of the programs is not just a question of formal institutions and personnel. It can also be measured by the attention given to them by Kim Jong Un from the outset of his assumption of power. Of particular significance in this regard was the roll-out of the byungjin line at the plenum of the Workers’ Party Central Committee and the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA) meetings in March-April 2013.⁵ The new policy line – ’On Consolidating the Position of Nuclear Weapons for Self-Defense’–committed the country to both economic reconstruction and the pursuit of its nuclear program. A separate edict committed the country to its space program, and set up a Space Development Bureau. The new policy was followed by the announcement of a five-year weapons modernization schedule in 2014 that included an increasing focus on modernization of the defense industrial base.⁶ Particularly in 2016–17, as tensions with the United States escalated, his guidance visits included tours of weapons manufacturing facilities, exhortation to modernization and praise for successful completion of plan targets.

To get some sense of the emphasis on the military industrial complex, we surveyed conventional and strategic weapons-related inspection visits that Kim Jong Il conducted between 1994 and 2011 and compared them with Kim Jong Un’s on-the-spot guidance inspections (Figure 3) between 2012 and 2017, the year before the onset of the summit era and the testing moratorium. Kim Jong Il made 45 publicized site visits to strategic weapons facilities during his 17 years in power, an average of 2.6 trips annually. He made 122 visits to conventional weapons-related facilities. Between 2012 -his first full year in power- and December 2017, Kim Jong Un made 57 trips to strategic weapons sites, an average of nearly six visits annually and more than twice the frequency of his father.

Figure 3. Site visits by Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong un to strategic vs. Conventional weapons facilities, 1994-July 2017.Source: News reports of Korean Central News Agency, collected and archived at NK Pro (https://kcnawatch.co).⁷

Figure 4. North Korean missile launches.

(Source: NKPro, North Korea Missile Tracker at https://www.nknews.org/tag/missiles/?t=1589231586629).

How did we get here? We turn to that question next by providing a reconstruction of the authoritarian mobilization model with respect to the nuclear and missile programs. The main objective of this history is to underline it’s long arc and the sustained commitment of the regime to acquiring these capabilities.⁷

The nuclear program

It is surprisingly hard to determine when Kim Il Sung decided to pursue a nuclear weapons program. The interest in nuclear technology was a virtual constant from the mid-1950s forward, but these early efforts were arguably associated with an economic and prestige interest in nuclear power. Denisov⁸ claims that the final decision on developing a weapons capability was not taken until the 1970s and others such as Bodansky⁹ even push it into the second half of the 1980s. Yet it is highly plausible that the ability of the United States to wield nuclear threats during the Korean War and in the armistice negotiations had a profound influence on Kim Il Sung’s interest in nuclear weapons from the 1950s, as demonstrated by Hayes¹⁰ and Mazaar¹¹ (see Dingman¹² for information on the threats themselves).

A range of evidence suggests the emergence of a nuclear weapons ambition as early as the first half of the 1960s at the latest (see Szalontai and Radchenko¹³ for a review of others reaching this conclusion). This evidence includes the first articulation of the byungjin line of simultaneous national defense and heavy-industrialization objectives at that time; a pattern of seeking to evade Soviet limits on the transfer of nuclear technology; the emergence of parallel acquisition tracks; and statements emanating from the leadership itself, now made available through the opening of the Soviet and Eastern European archives (for example, Szalontai and Radchenko¹⁴; Clemens¹⁵).

The manufacture of nuclear weapons requires capabilities in three discrete stages of the nuclear fuel cycle: the mining of uranium for the milling of fuel rods or for enrichment; the production of fissile material through reprocessing and/or enrichment; and the making of weapons themselves. With the partial exception of the uranium component of the nuclear fuel cycle, we see a common pattern of aggressive borrowing from foreign sources coupled with the development of complementary domestic capabilities.

Fueling the weapons drive: The uranium piece

One early suggestion of North Korean interest in developing a nuclear program came from a 1948 request from the Kim Il Sung regime to the Soviets as early as 1948 for assistance in prospecting, a request the Soviets sought to defer.¹⁶ These requests persisted, and resurfaced in the early 1960s when the drive for a nuclear program gained steam.¹⁷ According to Yoon,¹⁸ the two main mining sites came online between 1976 and 1981, both believed to be under the direct control of the military and both developed largely independently of the Soviets. In a pattern visible in other parts of the nuclear weapons and missile production chains, efforts at exploration and processing were supported by a cluster of universities that developed specialized expertise on both prospecting and separation of uranium.¹⁹

A key development in this part of the nuclear fuel cycle emerged as a result of the Soviet refusal to supply fuel to the 5MWe reactor that North Korea developed in the 1980s outside of Soviet control. The demand for fuel both for the 5MWe reactor and two much larger reactors in the planning stages was the motive for the construction of a complex devoted to uranium conversion and the milling of fuel rods.²⁰ Work on the Yongbyon fuel fabrication plant began in 1980–81 and according to declarations made to the IAEA operated from 1983–1986 before being decommissioned.²¹ This facility produced the fuel rods that were ultimately discharged from the 5MWe and stored in 1994 before being reprocessed in 2003, the defining event in the onset of the second nuclear crisis. These spent fuel rods also generated the fissile material believed to have powered the 2006 and subsequent tests.

Under Kim Jong Un, the regime has signaled heightened interest in the uranium segment of the nuclear fuel cycle, perhaps as a signal of capability to fuel its new light water reactor and to pursue renewed enrichment activities. This interest has been reflected both in new mining activities²² but also in the evidence of a new fuel fabrication plant.²³

The drive to nuclear power – and fissile material

The training of scientists and technicians and the development of research capabilities were initially cast in terms of an interest in developing nuclear power. A failed effort to establish a North Choson Central Research Institute²⁴ was followed in quick succession by the establishment of Kim Il Sung University in 1946, the Kimchaek Industrial University in 1948 and the Academy of Science of the DPRK in 1952, which in turn exercised control over a number of other research institutes related to the nuclear program. For example, in 1963 the Pyongsong Institute of Science (also called P’yongsong Scientific University) established a nuclear curriculum and from 1983 housed the Nuclear Physics Research Institute.²⁵ The dependence of these institutions on Soviet training was substantial, but by no means absolute. Kim Il Sung personally directed a peninsula-wide census of scientists, and managed to attract (or abduct) a number to seed these new institutions, most with degrees from Japanese institutions and some teaching in the South.

Formal bilateral agreements with the Soviet Union on educational and scientific cooperation respectively in 1952 and 1956 coincided with the opening in the Soviet Union of the United Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, designed as a hub for the sharing of nuclear technology between the Soviet Union and its allies. As we will see throughout the analysis of North Korean programs, external developments–North Korean participation in activities at Dubna – were matched by the development of an array of new departments and laboratories at North Korean universities and research institutes.²⁶ For example, a nuclear physics laboratory established under the new Academy of Sciences in 1955 became the nucleus of the Yongbyon complex under a 1959 bilateral agreement with the Soviet Union on cooperation on peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

Khruschev’s secret speech and the emergence of the Sino-Soviet split played into North Korean nuclear developments. The split between North Korea’s two communist patrons force the regime to balance its relations with the two countries in the alliance treaties of 1961. Not coincidentally, the evidence of an active interest in nuclear weapons technology first becomes unambiguously evident from the Soviet and Eastern European archives.²⁷ In September 1961, following Kim Il Sung’s public commitment to pursue nuclear power, a Nuclear Power Committee was established under the Central Committee of the KWP largely to facilitate international cooperation on the issue. The Nuclear Power Research Center was launched at around this time at Yongbyon and ultimately completed in 1967. A new nuclear physics laboratory was housed at the site in addition to another eight laboratories covering virtually the entire fuel cycle, including the production of fissile material.²⁸ Complementary developments occurred at nominally academic physics departments at Kim Il Sung and Kimchaek Industrial Universities.

The Soviets ultimately overcame their nervousness about sharing nuclear technology more directly and in June 1963, construction on the IRT2000 experimental reactor began and was completed in 1965 under Soviet aegis. But in a sign of the indigenous capabilities clustered at Yongbyon, this reactor was expanded to 4MWt in 1973 and 8MWt in 1998 without Soviet assistance.²⁹

In January 1974, North Korea enacted a Nuclear Power Law and in September North Korea became a member of IAEA. The IAEA opened another important foreign channel of technology transfer. Choe Hak Gun, the ambassador to IAEA from 1974 to 1978, appears to have collected resources on nuclear technology through the IAEA. Not coincidentally, North Korea acquired its first reprocessing capabilities around this time. The IRT2000 experimental reactor was the site for early experimentation with the separation of plutonium in 1975. These efforts were ultimately scaled up at the Yongbyon ‘radiochemistry laboratory’, the country’s main reprocessing facility, drawing on designs from a European consortium.³⁰ Construction of the radiochemistry laboratory probably began in 1984–85, and by the end of 1993, shortly before the facility was frozen according to the Agreed Framework, was 70–80% completed; nonetheless, the two lines in the plant were more than adequate to the task of reprocessing available spent fuel.³¹

There can be little question that North Korea’s crowning nuclear achievement was the successful construction of the 5MWe reactor at Yongbyon (1979–86), another development that demonstrated the ability of the North Korean nuclear establishment to bypass the Soviets and exploit publicly available foreign scientific information.³² The indigenous reactor was modeled after the U.K.’s Calder Hall ‘Magnox’ reactor – another European connection–designed by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) in the early 1950s.³³ The design was perfect for local endowments: fueled by natural uranium, a capability that North Korea had developed as we have seen; cooled by a carbon-dioxide gas cooling system that does not require heavy water technology; and moderated by graphite, also plentiful in the country.

The Agreed Framework reached in the wake of the first nuclear crisis ultimately froze construction on two other reactors: a 50MWe reactor at Yongbyon and the 200MWe reactor at Taechon, for which the 5MWe reactor was planned as a prelude. It is revealing that these two reactors were modeled after the French G-2 reactor, which France also developed in the 1950s primarily for plutonium production. While smaller in size, the 5MWe reactor was adequate for North Korea’s fissile material needs given the parallel development of reprocessing capabilities. Although shut down in 1994 by the Agreed Framework, the reactor was restarted in 2003 when that agreement collapsed, shut down again four years later as a result of agreements reached under the Six Party Talks, but restarted again in mid-2013 with likely discharge and reprocessing of plutonium in 2016.

The second path to fissile material is through enrichment, and provides a case study in how illicit transfers fueled indigenous developments.³⁴ The onset of the second nuclear crisis in 2002 was the direct outgrowth of American intelligence that the DPRK was experimenting with a uranium enrichment programme. The origins of this program date to 1993–94 and North Korea’s insertion into the A.Q. Khan network. In his memoirs, Pervez Musharraf³⁵ revealed that two dozen P1 and P2 centrifuges and measuring equipment had been transferred to North Korea, enough to begin trial enrichment. Moreover, there was ongoing technology transfer following a more formalized agreement in 1996 before it was reversed under Musharraf after 2001.³⁶

Subsequent illicit activities that were required to access critical inputs for the program, such as maraging steel and aluminum, became a central focus of sanctions efforts and have been well-documented by many including Albright and Brannan.³⁷ These activities required a trading front, a role played by the Nam Chongang Trading Company and other companies subsequently spun off from it.

In response to sanctions imposed in 2009, North Korea openly acknowledged the program and even invited a group of American scientists to visit in 2010.³⁸ The sophistication of the program – with 2000 centrifuges arranged in six cascades with a capacity of 8000 separative work units (SWU) per year – was far beyond what at least some in the intelligence community had estimated. The visit provided strong circumstantial evidence that North Korea maintained a second, secret site where its enrichment capability was piloted or ran in parallel, perhaps even during the Agreed Framework period; by 2016, evidence from satellite imagery and defectors suggested a location for this site at an underground aircraft manufacturing plant.³⁹ But of equal importance to our purposes here, the visit implied a massive industrial infrastructure for manufacturing of centrifuges, which would have included, inter alia, a number of complex technologies in addition to the input of UF₆: vacuum pumps; ring magnets; frequency inverters; maraging steel and particularly machine tools, up to and including computer numeric controlled flow-forming machines.⁴⁰

Weaponization

Despite the fact that North Korea has conducted six nuclear tests, the weapons development phase of the cycle is obviously the most opaque. North Korea first announced that it had nuclear weapons in 2003.⁴¹ and first tested a small device on 6 October 2006 at the Punggye-ri test site. The question is how far back we can push the start date of an actual weapons program. The 101 Nuclear Physics Chemistry Institute is believed to have conducted nuclear weapons research as early as the 1970s; the fact that the unit is housed inside a mine in the vicinity of Yongbyon is suggestive of the secrecy and security surrounding its operation. At that point, however, North Korea was still not close to having the fissile material for a weapon.

It is more likely that the push toward weaponization occurred in the second half of the 1980s when fissile material was more plausibly in sight. By the early 1990s, a cluster of reports suggested elements of a weaponization program, including test explosions at Yongbyon from the early 1990s that are consistent with development of an implosion device. Moreover, defector testimony has claimed a bomb-building program and even actual weapons in the early 1990s.⁴² Yet as the earlier description of the facilities housed at Yongbyon suggest, the first investments in these capabilities came decades before the first test.

With the tests, the debate about weaponization has shifted from whether North Korea could engineer a device to whether they can miniaturize it for delivery on a warhead and how far down the boosted or hydrogen weapons path they can go. This debate goes somewhat beyond our purposes here; it is only worth noting that the assessments of how long it will take North Korea to achieve these capabilities has fallen steadily and for military planning purposes, the existence of the capability is now effectively assumed.

The missile infrastructure

Until the Kim Jong Un years, the North Koreans pursued five overlapping missile programs: the Scud, Nodong, Musudan, Taepodong and KN-02 programs, with the complementary Taepodong or Paektusan programs generating satellite launch vehicles. Even before the accelerated testing and second ‘big push’ of the Kim Jong Un years, the missile inventory had thus already grown in size, implying a range of discrete development programs corresponding to missiles of different ranges and involving different production processes and even facilities. Although early phases of the program are clearly phased, a striking feature of North Korea’s missile development is a big push to extend ranges beginning in the late-1980s and persisting to this day.

The second big push came during the Kim Jong Un years and saw unanticipated developments along a number of fronts. Strategically, the most important developments are those that increase survivability and lower launch times: road mobile missiles of extended range, solid fuel capabilities, and completely new programs such as the pursuit of a SLBM capability.

How do we understand these developments? With respect to virtually each system, there is a robust debate in the open source literature on the extent to which direct transfers of whole systems, foreign designs and technical assistance as well as parts and components played into particular missiles (see particularly Shiller 2012⁴³). At one end are those who see strong reverse engineering and subsequent innovation capabilities. A second possibility is a ‘licenced production’ model in which North Korea is working off foreign designs and inputs. A third possibility is the existence of various mixed models of acquisition involving both foreign and domestic capabilities. And at the more skeptical end are those who believe that at least some systems reflect little more than outright purchase of existing stocks, most likely from Russia. Finally, a fifth interpretation – at least for some systems – cannot be ruled out: that development efforts represented bluffs or strategic attempts to mislead foreign intelligence agencies about capabilities.

This debate cannot be fully resolved, but we can gain some perspective by considering some of the similarities and differences with the nuclear story. The nuclear program rests on a fairly discrete set of steps required to get from uranium to fissile material to weapons. The effort could thus be focused on single facilities at each stage, for example, the fuel fabrication plant, the reactors, the reprocessing facility, and device and bomb-making. A partial exception to this generalization is the enrichment program, which implied an industrial-scale effort to manufacture centrifuges.

Missile development and production similarly involves basic and applied R&D and the acquisition or manufacture of a number of inputs and subassemblies. But it does so on a serial production basis that requires underlying process engineering and systems integration capability. This is particularly true when we consider that the program enjoyed a brief but extremely significant commercial phase when North Korea was not simply manufacturing missiles for its own use but for export as well.⁴⁴

Perhaps the best way to sort out this debate between foreign dependence, absorption, and indigenization is to acknowledge that North Korea pursues all these different approaches simultaneously and opportunistically. Nonetheless, the most important feature of the model is the ability to absorb foreign inputs, reverse engineer, and add domestic improvements to allow for constant upgrading. This sequence can be called the Acquistion, Digestion, Engineering, and Re-innovation (ADER) model.⁴⁵ Acquisition means the purchase, theft or other transfer of foreign technologies and know-how. Digestion refers to the processes required to collate, assess, and diffuse the acquired foreign capabilities internally. Engineering is the ability to turn this absorbed knowledge and technology into output, of which reverse engineering is a key method. The actual output appears thus as a kind of re-innovation.

Developing domestic capabilities in munitions

From independence, North Korean engineers went to the Soviet Union to receive technical training in the production of weapons, for which demand expanded dramatically once the war broke out. A number of military factories date to the war or early postwar period.⁴⁶ The wider scope of the military industrial complex as it has evolved since then can be seen in the fact that while the 4^th and 5^th Bureau of Machine Industry of the Second Economic Committee are involved in the missiles and the WMD program respectively, the Committee oversees a total of seven such bureaus as well as a trading company, with one estimate in the mid-2000s counting 134 separate factories.⁴⁷

By the mid-1960s, the leadership’s focus was still overwhelmingly on other conventional weapons systems rather than missiles. In 1962, North Korea received an SA-2 surface-to-air missile from the Soviet Union, but at that juncture had no domestic capability. Yet as with respect to the nuclear program, the regime invested simultaneously in domestic capabilities. In 1963, the Hamhung Military Academy – now the Defense University–was built for the explicit purpose of developing advanced weapons.⁴⁸ The Defense University became an important feeder for the Academy of National Defense Science, or the Second Academy of Natural Science, that was established in 1964. A recent report on the Academy of Defense Science shows how it grouped a number of specialized bodies together, bodies that came under the Munitions Industry Department at the time of the formation of the Second Economic Committee. In 1993, Kim Il Sung ordered that all such research institutes would fall under the Academy of National Defense Science and they included a wide array of engineering capabilities: metals, electronics; engines; satellites, electronic warfare and so on.

Most importantly, grouped under these research institutes are so-called ‘middle factories’ located in Pyongyang city and the Hamkyong and Pyongan provinces that constitute the effective production infrastructure. A combination of defector testimony and satellite imagery has expanded the public source tracking of this infrastructure; for example, the NTI database⁴⁹ lists no fewer than 21 facilities that are engaged either directly in missile manufacture or in linked industries. But given the incentive to put such facilities underground and hide them, this should be taken as a lower bound of the production infrastructure.

Technology transfer, reverse engineering and innovation: An overview of the programs under Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il⁵⁰

It is far beyond the scope of this paper to provide a thorough analysis of the development of all of the main missile systems.⁵¹ However, it is possible to consider the evolution of several systems – the early Scud variants, the Nodong and Taepodong – as a way of demonstrating the operation of the ADER model. Several points bear emphasis. First is the wide variety of foreign channels that the North Koreans have used to advance the program: from direct state-to-state transfers and technology cooperation agreements, to purloined foreign designs, illicit scientific cooperation and the aggressive exploitation of global product and technology markets, including for goods that nominally face strict dual-use export restraints. The second point to make is that the debate over foreign or domestic influences is to some extent misleading, as even absorption of foreign technology and information requires domestic capabilities.

These domestic capabilities start with duplicative imitation or direct copying with no local refinements but is followed by creative imitation in which the same foreign platform is subjected to moderate levels of domestic modification. In the most advanced phases of imitation, creative adaptation demonstrates significant levels of domestic improvement. A big question is whether North Korea’s missile innovation system remains at this advanced imitation level or has crossed over into homegrown innovation, in which the platform is primarily locally designed and developed. It is doubtful that North Korea has reached this step if the metric is an entire missile system some core designs of which are clearly inherited. But we can’t rule out innovation in some subsystems nor in systems integration.

As with the nuclear program, the missile story also commenced in earnest in the 1960s. Following a brief period of Soviet-DPRK stress that interrupted arms transfers and cooperation, North Korea reached an agreement with the Soviet Union on military cooperation in 1965 that included provision of the S-2 Sopka (SSC-2b SAMLET) coastal-defense cruise missile, P-20 (SS-N-2 STYX) anti-ship missile, and the 3R10 Luna-2 (FROG-5) artillery rocket as well as TELs and other equipment. The Soviet Union was not the only source of early missile technology, however. In the late 1960s, Soviet-DPRK relations again soured and Moscow held back further weapons transfers. North Korea reached an agreement with China in 1971 that allowed it not only to acquire another cluster of missile technologies⁵² but to reorganize its Soviet-related programs.

This early Soviet and Chinese training – including assembly, test and maintenance – no doubt expanded North Korean capabilities. However, we can also assume that the systems that North Korea received were also sent to the Academy of National Defense Science for reverse engineering which the North Koreans had probably achieved with respect to at least some of these systems (including the Chinese HQ-2 and HY-1) by the mid- to late-1970s.

The next generation of missiles, and the first ballistic missiles, arose in the face of limitations on support from both the Soviet Union and China. When Kim Il Sung visited Beijing in 1975 he sought deepened missile cooperation but just as the Cultural Revolution was unfolding. It was at this juncture that the regime launched a more concerted missile program and entered into a new partnership with Egypt in 1976.

Although there is some controversy about the timing,⁵³ Egypt subsequently sent North Korea Soviet R-17E (SS-1 C Scud B), MAZ-543 TELs, and other equipment in return for technical support in developing joint Egyptian and North Korean capabilities.⁵⁴ It was the reverse engineering of these transferred weapons that led to the Hwasong-5, key to which is a long-standing Russian engine design that was relatively easy to mass produce and highly reliable.⁵⁵ The first tests of this missile were not undertaken until 1984, however, and half failed. The speed with which they subsequently achieved a low failure rate – perhaps three years to reverse engineering and another three years to mass production–leads Schiller⁵⁶ to conclude that the ‘pure reverse engineering plus innovation’ hypothesis is probably not correct: there was either substantial outside help that is not visible or some of the Hwasong 5’s (and subsequent generations) could even have been purchased from retired Soviet inventories.

Whatever assistance North Korea might have received, however, it was also precisely at this time that the North began selling missiles to Iran. Most clients were not probably involved in significant co-development (Syria, Egypt, Libya) because they lacked the capabilities. But the rapid expansion of demand, information gleaned from Iraqi Scud variants provided by Iran⁵⁷ and the sharing of other information with the Iranians almost certainly deepened North Korean capabilities⁵⁸ What followed was the heyday of the North Korean missile export program – roughly from 1987–1993–after which demand began to contract and become more erratic.⁵⁹ At the peak of serial production, North Korea was producing as many as 8–10 missiles a month.⁶⁰

These capabilities were subsequently leveraged into the first important incremental innovation of the North Korean missile program. The Hwasong 6 (Scud C) could have reflected a number of incremental technological adjustments of the Hwasong 5 (Scud B) without any fundamental breakthroughs: reduction in warhead weight, lightening of the airframe (thanks to imports of specialty steel from Russia), modifications to the Hwasong 5 propellant and oxidizer tanks and guidance systems. Wright and Kadyshev⁶¹ suggest that the key innovation in expanding range was probably incremental improvements in the Russian engines, with Chinese assistance. The Scud ER (Hwasong 9) represented a further iteration, with development beginning in 1991 and the first flight test in 1993.

The end of the Cold War was a particular shock for North Korea, and the opportunities for state-to-state collaboration with both Russia and China rapidly disappeared. But these state-to-state links were quickly replaced by a range of new scientific and technical networks. These included the recruitment of Russian and even Japanese scientists and the Iran and Pakistan connections. According to Kim Kil-son, a defector, engineers from the Soviet Union, Pakistan and Iran were working at laboratories under the Academy of National Defense Science from 1991. The Russian connection seems to have been particularly important, first recruited through a solid-state physicist Anatoliy Rubtsov and ultimately involving as many as 60 scientists.⁶² A smaller contingent of Korean-Japanese scientists associated with the pro-North Korean Chongryon (or Chosoren in Japanese) also have been implicated, working at the University of Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science and probably contributing to the development of missile engines.⁶³

These patterns of foreign involvement were also clearly evident in the next major missile program: the Nodong. The timing of the initiation of the Nodong program in 1988, roughly contemporaneous with the Hwasong 6, suggests that it was probably the first missile that was designed with nuclear ambitions from the outset, overlapping with the early evidence of weaponization efforts described above. The development of the Nodong remains even more controversial than the early Scud variants because of the paucity of flight tests and apparent technical problems (2008, 19). But it is possible North Korea was securing information from tests of similar or even identical Iranian Shahab 3 and Pakistani Ghauri/ Hatf 5 missiles⁶⁴

The way in which prior capabilities provided the foundation for subsequent ones is most clear in the initiation of the Taepodong (in Korean Paektusan) program in the early 1990s, which generated the Taepodong 1 and 2 and became the foundation for the subsequent Unha satellite launches (in April 2009 and April 2012, which failed, and in December 2012 and February 2016 that succeeded). In both cases, the main strategic objective was clearly to extend range as well as payload. For our purposes, though, the most important feature of these systems is the way in which they leveraged the Scud variants and Nodong programs. This new program included two- or three-stage missiles with a Nodong variant as the first stage and a Hwasong variant in the second. The system was first tested in spectacular fashion in satellite mode in August 1998 in the first test that overflew Japan. The 1998 test ultimately generated a moratorium that held from September 1999 until July 2006,⁶⁵ but no one believed that the North Koreans were sitting still during this period. Following the tests of July 2006 it became clear that a variety of new programs had been initiated, including most significantly the further extensions of the Hwasong noted above as well as the Musudan⁶⁶ and the KN-02, a shorter-range missile that was nonetheless programmatically significant for its use of solid fuel.

Into the Kim Jong Un era

As we noted in the introduction, it has become abundantly clear that the commitment to the nuclear and missile programs has become a defining feature of the Kim Jong Un regime. The acceleration of missile tests from the onset of his rule up to the flurry of tests in late 2017 and the period of ‘fire and fury’ with the US tells the story. But outside of a pause on testing, the short-lived period of nuclear diplomacy – running roughly from the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in February 2018 through the failed Hanoi summit a year later – did not succeed in making a dent in the developments described here. To the contrary, the failure to secure sanctions relief has probably led to another moment of acceleration in the effort to deepen capabilities.

From our perspective, however, the important development of the Kim Jong Un years is not quantitative but qualitative. In particular, five objectives of Kim Jong Un’s big push have forced either important innovations in existing systems or altogether new programs.⁶⁷ Our understanding of the source of the technologies that undergird them is very much a work in progress, and it is not our objective to provide a full inventory of capabilities. But each is worth noting briefly as they clearly rest on prior developments.

• Extending the range of the strategic rocket force. The most striking feature of the 2017 tests was what appeared to be unprecedented jumps in range, mirrored in the debate over whether North Korea had an ICBM capability (tests of the Hwasong 12 [May, August], Hwasong 14 [twice in July] and Hwasong 15 [October]). These tests also revived the question of the plausibility of purely domestic development, with suspicion focusing on the acquisition of a high-performance liquid-propellant engine from illicit networks in Russia and Ukraine.⁶⁸ A military parade in October 2020 appeared to reveal yet another generation, a surprisingly large two-stage liquid propelled ICBM that was quickly dubbed a Hwasong-16.

• The quest for road-mobile missiles with greater ranges in order to achieve survivability and a credible second-strike capability, with demands not only on the missile program but on transporter-erector-launcher technology as well.

• Closely related, the development of solid-fuel rocket technology, most notably to extend the range of the Russian KN-02 SRBM design that could be deployed both on mobile land launchers and as an SLBM capability. Tests in 2017 included the first flight test of KN-15, a land-based version of the KN-11 and every test since that time has used solid propellants. 


• The pursuit of naval platforms and a submarine launched ballistic missile capability, with a new variant revealed shortly after President Biden’s inauguration, also motivated by achieving a credible second-strike.

• Continuing pursuit of the satellite and space launch vehicle program that increasingly appears to be a component of the ICBM program.

As of this writing, long-range missile tests have been on pause. Even the failure of the Hanoi Summit in February 2019 did not lead to a reversal of the test moratorium. However, North Korea is clearly continuing to develop its missile capabilities, resumed testing of short-range missiles shortly after the breakdown of the Hanoi summit and continued such tests into the Biden administration. The Trump administration admitted that the regime continued to generate fissile material under its watch.⁶⁹ An important Central Committee meeting in 2018 signaled the ‘completion’ of the strategic nuclear and missile forces. Similar signals have been sent since, not only through work reports of important meetings – such as the Fifth Plenum of December 2019 and the 8^th Party Congress of January 2021 – but in the display of missiles of clearly inter-continental design at the military parade in October 2020.⁷⁰

The big push under Kim Jong Un and the test successes suggest that the North Korean nuclear and missile programs have reached a critical juncture in the country’s move up the innovation ladder. The missile sector has already reached the stage of advanced imitation where most if not all of its programs demonstrate a significant level of domestic improvement on existing designs, and as we have emphasized here, the capacity to produce.

Conclusions: The vital ingredients of the North Korean model for nuclear weapons and ballistic missile development

The story of how the DPRK built a nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile capability appears to go against all geo-strategic, economic, and technological odds. Indeed, it is a test case for how even the poorest, most backward, and isolated states can engage in the development of potent defense innovation capabilities if the leadership is willing to prioritize the effort, build complementary domestic capability and exploit the many holes in the nonproliferation architecture. The features of the authoritarian mobilization approach to catch-up are worth reiterating.

• A unified and single-minded leadership with long time horizons that is able to mobilize the entire resources of the country for an extended period of time to pursue its strategic goal regardless of economic and social costs at home and isolation abroad. This is especially the case under Kim Jong Un, who has shown a laser-like focus and dedication to the development of strategic weapons capabilities far greater than his father.

• Significant access to foreign technology and knowledge, especially in the formative stages of research and development, and the continuing ability to acquire critical foreign technologies at later phases. This requires a well-connected and well-funded international network of suppliers and collaborators as well as an effective intelligence collection system.

• A well-trained, experienced, and wide bench of scientists and engineers across the full range of scientific, technological, and engineering disciplines needed for nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Even if foreign scientists have contributed, the claims of official propaganda carry an important germ of truth: that the strategic weapons complex ultimately rests on the training of North Korean scientists, technicians and production managers and workers. On this dimension, North Korea appears to differ most sharply from the less comprehensive efforts of Libya, Iraq, Syria and even Iran.

• An effective systems integration capability that is able to manage all the diverse and complex design, research, development, and engineering processes involved in the absorption and reverse engineering of foreign technologies and marrying this with domestically developed technologies.

• An institutional culture that is willing to take risks, learn from mistakes, be flexible and adaptive, and to learn while doing. These characteristics seem to be at odds with the highly ideological, risk-adverse, and tightly regimented norms that appear to characterize the North Korean political system. But such clichés mislead, as the system proved highly flexible and adaptive at the top.

The implications of this story for how to manage North Korea go far beyond our purposes. However, the findings of this essay clearly have a number of implications for the effort of the Biden administration to revive negotiations with North Korea. The country not only has a deployed nuclear weapons capability but also a very large workforce of highly skilled strategic weapons scientists and engineers. In addition to the complexities of negotiating a pause, let alone a rollback, of this capability negotiations will need to consider the deeper implications of the system we have outlined here. The international community must grapple not only with North Korean weapons, but with the entire strategic weapons complex we have described and the difficulty – if not impossibility – of rolling it back.

Finally and returning to the theme of defense innovation, the North Korean case study provides an example of the rapid catch-up variant put forward in the introductory chapter. In this model, catalytic factors motivate technological and industrial development, which has clearly happened in North Korea where top level leadership intervention has been shaped by acute external threat environment. Yet threats are not enough; other attributes of successful catch-up states need to be in place including effective absorption of foreign technologies and the highly targeted mobilization of limited national resources. The question going forward is whether, at least in the defense sphere, North Korea will remain locked in the catch-up category or can make the transition and become an advanced and sustainable military technological regime. Given the country’s ability to advance despite significant sanctions headwinds, the possibility can no longer be ruled out.

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to acknowledge the invaluable research assistance from Taseul Joo, who compiled key data sources and conducted extensive reviews of Korean language sources and Daniel Pinkston for detailed comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by, or in part by, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office under contract/grant No. [W911NF-15-1-0407]. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Army Research Office.

Notes on contributors

Stephan Haggard

Stephan Haggard is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor of Korea-Pacific Studies, and serves as director of the Korea-Pacific Program at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego in La Jolla, California.

Tai Ming Cheung

Tai Ming Cheung is the director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and a professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego in La Jolla, California.

Notes

¹ Joseph Bermudez, ‘Overview of North Korea’s NBC Infrastructure’, US-Korea Institute, June (Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies 2017), p. 14, Figure 2.

² Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements and the Case of North Korea (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2017).

³ Bermudez, Overview of North Korea’s NBC Infrastructure.

⁴ ‘North Korean “Missile Researcher” Lays Bare Missile Development by the North Korean Military,’ Shindong-A, 9 (March 2015).

⁵ ‘Report of Plenary Meeting of WPK Central Committee, ‘KCNA 31 March 2013 and ‘Seventh Session of the 12^th SPA of DPRK Held’, 1 April 2013 and on nuclear weapons in particular: ‘Law on Consolidating Position of Nuclear Weapons State Adopted’, KCNA 1 April 2013 and particularly ‘Nuke and Peace 1ʹ and ‘Nuke and Peace 2’, KCNA 26 and 27 April 2013.

⁶ Suk Lee, ed, The DPRK Economic Outlook: 2016 (Seoul: Korea Development Institute 2017), 131–132.

⁷ Conventional weapons sites include munitions factories, military research centers, artillery factories, ammunition factories, military-related universities, some precision machinery factories, KPA unit factories, and machine plants inter alia. Strategic weapons sites include a group of munitions factories rocket test facilities, chemical weapons factory/ research centers, strategic rocket forces sites, aerospace facilities, the National Defense university, bio-chemistry research centers, the State Academy of Science, Hamhung Research Center and related facilities.Figure 4

⁸ Valery I. Denisov, ‘Nuclear Institutions and Organizations in North Korea’, in James Clay Moltz and Alexandre Mansourov (eds.), The North Korean Nuclear Program: Security, Strategy, and New Perspectives from Russia (New York: Routledge 2000), 22.

⁹ Yoseff Bodansky, Crisis in Korea (New York: Spi Books 1994), 113.

¹⁰ Peter Hayes, Pacific Powderkeg: American Nuclear Dilemmas in Korea (Lexington: Lexington Books 1991), 3–16.

¹¹ Michael J. Mazaar, North Korea and the Bomb: A Case Study in Nonproliferation (New York: St. Martins 1995), 15–21.

¹² Roger Dingman, ‘Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War’, International Security, 13/3 (Winter, 1988–89), 50–91.

¹³ Balazs Szalontai and Sergey Radchenko, ‘North Korea’s Efforts to Acquire Nuclear Technology and Nuclear Weapons: Evidence from Russian and Hungarian Archives’, Cold War Internationial History Project, Working Paper #53, Aug. 2006, 24.

¹⁴ Szalontai and Radchenko, ‘North Korea’s Efforts to Acquire Nuclear Technology and Nuclear Weapons’.

¹⁵ Walter Clemens, ‘North Korea’s Quest for Nuclear Weapons: New Historical Evidence’, Journal of East Asian Studies 10 (April 2010), 127–54.

¹⁶ See Protocol No. 61 of a meeting of the special committee under the Council of Ministers of the USSR (excerpt). Wilson Center Digital Archive at http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/110597.

¹⁷ For example, the North Koreans reportedly communicated the interest in mining uranium and extracting large amounts of it to the Soviet ambassador Vasily Moskovsky in September 1963 (Clemens 2010, 129).

¹⁸ Edward Yoon, ‘Status and Future of the North Korean Minerals Sector’, Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability (January 2011).

¹⁹ Kim-Chaek Engineering University, Chongjin Mining and Metal University, the University of the Chemical Industry, Sariwon Geology University and the Yongbyon nuclear technical college described in more detail below.

²⁰ International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), North Korea’s Weapons Programmes: A Net Assessment, (London: 2004), 33–34.

²¹ This facility was subsequently converted to the enrichment operation that was revealed in 2010 to a visiting group of American scientists (Hecker 2010).

²² International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 2011, 7. Andrea Berger, ‘What Lies Beneath: North Korean Uranium Deposits,’ NKNews, Aug. 28 2014. https://www.nknews.org/2014/08/what-lies-beneath-north-koreas-uranium-deposits/ and Jeffrey Lewis, ‘Recent Imagery Suggests Increased Uranium Production,’ 38North, Aug. 12 2015. http://www.38north.org/2015/08/jlewis081215/.

²³ Nick Hansen, ‘Major Development: Reactor Fuel Fabrication Facilities Identified at Yongbyon Nuclear Complex,’ 38North, Dec. 23 2013. at http://www.38north.org/2013/12/yongbyon122313/#_ftn2/.

²⁴ Kang Ho Je (강호제), History of Science and Technology in North Korea (북한과학기술형성사) (Seoul: Son In (선인) 2007).

²⁵ Joseph Bermudez, ‘Exposing North Korea’s Secret Nuclear Infrastructure I’, Jane’s Intelligence Review, July 1999.

²⁶ Alexander Zhebin, ‘A Political History of Soviet-North Korean Nuclear Cooperation’, in James Clay Moltz and Alexandre Mansourov (eds.), The North Korean Nuclear Program: Security, Strategy, and New Perspectives from Russia (New York: Routledge 2000), 29.

²⁷ Szalontai and Radchenko, ‘North Korea’s Efforts to Acquire Nuclear Technology and Nuclear Weapons’, 27–30. Clemens, ‘North Korea’s Quest for Nuclear Weapons’, 130.

²⁸ Bermudez, ‘Exposing North Korea’s Secret Nuclear Infrastructure I’. Bill Streifer and Sang S. Nam. 2012. ‘In a North Korean Nuclear Defector’s Own Words’, KPA Journal 2/11 (November 2012).

²⁹ National Threat Iniative, ‘IRT 2000 Nuclear Research Reactor’ at http://www.nti.org/learn/facilities/767/.

³⁰ Eurochemic was a consortium owned by thirteen European countries that ran a plant dedicated to the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel from 1966–1974; it disseminated developed technologies widely. See Olli Heinonen, ‘North Korea’s Nuclear Enrichment: Capabilities and Consequences’ at http://www.38north.org/2011/06/heinonen062211/.

³¹ David Albright, ‘North Korean Plutonium Production’, Science and Global Security 5 (September 1994), 63–87. International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), North Korea’s Weapons Programmes, 36–39.

³² New reseach based on the Hungarian archives suggested that North Korea was openly seeking assistance in the consruction of reactors (Szalontai and Rachchenko 2006). On the indirect British role, Douglas Hogg, a Conservative minister, admitted in a written parliamentary reply in 1994 that the Yongbyon reactor had ‘generic similarities to the reactors operated by British Nuclear Fuels’ and that ‘design information of these British reactors is not classified and has appeared in technical journals.’

³³ The name ‘magnox’ came from the alloy used to clad the fuel rods, a technology that the North Korean also appropriated.

³⁴ David Albright, Peddling Peril: How The Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies (New York: Free Press 2010). David Albright and Paul Brannan, ‘Taking Stock: North Korea’s Uranium Enrichment Program’, Institute for Science and International Security, Oct. 2011) at https://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/ISIS_DPRK_UEP.pdf. Siegfried S. Hecker, ‘A Return Trip to North Korea’s Yongbyon Nuclear Complex’, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Nov. (Stanford University 2010) at https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/HeckerYongbyon.pdf.

³⁵ Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire (New York: Free Press 2006), 296.

³⁶ Albright and Brannan, ‘Taking Stock: North Korea’s Uranium Enrichment Program’.

³⁷ see note 37 above.

³⁸ Hecker, ‘A Return Trip to North Korea’s Yongbyon Nuclear Complex’.

³⁹ David Albright, ‘North Korea’s Suspect, Former Small-Scale Enrichment Plant’, ISIS 21, Sept. 2016. at http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/North_Koreas_Pilot_Enrichment_Plant_21Jul2016_Final.pdf

⁴⁰ Early suspect firms involved in the program are believed to be the Ryonha Machinery Joint Venture Corporation in Pyongyang, the Kusong Machine-Tool Plant in North Pyongan Province, and the Huichon Machine Tool Factory in Huichon city (Albright and Brannan, ‘Taking Stock: North Korea’s Uranium Enrichment Program’, 2010, 21).

⁴¹ ‘Statement of DPRK government on its withdrawal from NPT’, KCNA, Jan.10 2003.

⁴² AFP, ‘“Test Explosions” at DPRK Nuclear Facility,’ June 28 1991; Crisis Group, ‘Asia Report No. 168: North Korea’s Nuclear and Missile Programs’, June 2009, 9–11; and David Albright and Kevin O’Neill, Solving the North Korean Nuclear Puzzle (Washington DC: ISIS Press, 2000).

⁴³ Markus Schiller, Characterizing the North Korean Nuclear Missile Threat (Santa Monica: RAND 2012).

⁴⁴ Joshua Pollack, ‘Ballistic Missile Trajectory: The Evolution of North Korea’s Ballistic Missile Market’, Nonproliferation Review 18/2 (June 2011), 411–429.

⁴⁵ Tai Ming Cheung, ‘Innovation in China’s Defense Technology Base-Foreign Technology and Military Capabilities’, Journal of Strategic Studies 36 (September 2016), 5–6.

⁴⁶ Heavy material industry of North Korea, North Korea Information, searched in 17 October 2017, http://nkinfo.unikorea.go.kr/nkp/overview/nkOverview.do?sumryMenuId=EC212.

⁴⁷ First Bureau, firearms and general logistics equipment; Second Bureau, tanks and armored vehicle; Third Bureau, artillery; Sixth Bureau, shipbuilding; Seventh Bureaa, aircraft and communications equipment. Hong Song-pyo, ‘North Korea’s Military Science and Technology,’ Kunsa Nontan, Apr. 29 2005. See also Dan Pinkston, The North Korean Ballistic Missile Program (Carlisle: Strategic Studies Institute 2008) 15, 41–2.

⁴⁸ SBS news, http://news.sbs.co.kr/news/endPage.do?news_id=N1004383078 Another important educational and research initiative was the creation of the Science University in 1967 in Pyongsong. Falling under the Academy of Science, it was tasked with training scientists and engineers who earn the privilege of study abroad and subsequently work at the Academy of Defense or Academy of Science.

⁴⁹ At http://www.nti.org/learn/countries/north-korea/facilities/.

⁵⁰ In addition to the works referenced below, this section relies on two websites that provide high-quality information on the programs: the National Threat Initiative at http://www.nti.org/learn/countries/north-korea/delivery-systems/ and the CSIS Missile Threat Initiative at https://missilethreat.csis.org/country/dprk/.

⁵¹ An extensive literature now exists on these programs. See Bermudez, 1999c, Bermudez, ‘Going Ballistic: North Korea’s Advanced Missile Capabilities’, Jane’s Intelligence Review, Mar. 2009; IISS, North Korea’s Weapons Programmes; Pinkston, The North Korean Ballistic Missile Program; Wright 2009; Schiller, Characterizing the North Korean Nuclear Missile Threat; and Postol and Schiller, ‘The North Korean Ballistic Missile Program’, Korea Observer 47/4 (December 2016), 751–806.

⁵² These systems were themselves modified versions of Soviet designs. See Bermudez 1999c, 3–4.

⁵³ Pinkston, The North Korean Ballistic Missile Program, 15.

⁵⁴ On expansion of the Musudan-ri facility during the 2000s, see Digital Globe, ‘Musudan-ri Missile Test Facility North Korea, 15 February 2002–26 March, 2009ʹ. at https://fas.org/nuke/guide/dprk/facility/musudan-ri.pdf.

⁵⁵ Theodore Postol and Markus Schiller, ‘The North Korean Ballistic Missile Program’, Korea Observer 47/4 (December 2016), 767.

⁵⁶ Schiller, Characterizing the North Korean Nuclear Missile Threat.

⁵⁷ Pinkston, The North Korean Ballistic Missile Program, 17.

⁵⁸ Joseph Bermudez, ‘A History of Ballistic Missile Development in the DPRK’, Center for Nonproliferation Studies Occasional Paper #2, Nov. 1999, 18–19.

⁵⁹ Pollack, ‘Ballistic Missile Trajectory’.

⁶⁰ Bermudez, ‘A History of Ballistic Missile Development in the DPRK’, 13–15.

⁶¹ Wright and Kadyshev, ‘An Analysis of the North Korean Nodong Missile’, Science & Global Security 4/2 (1994), 129–60.

⁶² Two more groups of Russian experts planning to travel to North Korea were intercepted in 1992, one of missile engineers the other associated with the country’s nuclear program, but it is not known how many got through. Not until late 1993 was North Korean Major General Nam Gae Wok, stationed in Moscow as a recruiter, finally expelled from Russia. See Yonhap (Seoul), 23 April 1994; in JPRS-TND-94-011, 16 May 1994, 51–52. UPI, 10 February 1993, in Executive News Service, 10 February 1993. Mikhail Popov, Rabochaya Tribuna, (Moscow) 11 February 1993, 3; in JPRS-UST-93-002, 8 April 1993, 52. KBS-1 Radio Network (Seoul), 21 December 1992; in JPRS-TND-93-001, 7 January 1993, 6. Itar-Tass, 4 February 1993; in JPRS-TND-93-005, 12 February 1993, 14–15. UPI, 10 February 1993; in Executive News Service, 10 February 1993. Itar-Tass, 24 February 1993; in FBIS-SOV-93-035, 24 February 1993, 11–12. Armed Forces Journal International, April 1993, 9.

⁶³ Tsutomu Nishioka, ‘Researchers in Japan helped N. Korea develop Nuclear Missiles’, Japan Institute for National Fundamentals, Apr. 7 2016. https://en.jinf.jp/weekly/archives/4308.

⁶⁴ Wright and Kadyshev, ‘An Analysis of the North Korean Nodong Missile’, 129–60, missing in the references. Joseph Bermudez, ‘Going Ballistic: North Korea’s Advanced Missile Capabilities’, Jane’s Intelligence Review, Mar. 2009.

⁶⁵. See for example Philip Maxon, ‘Official Estimates of the TP-2ʹ, 38North, Jan. 28 2011 for a thorough review of the US intelligence estimates of the Taepodong’s capabilities at http://www.38north.org/2011/01/estimates-of-taepodong-2/.

⁶⁶ Markus Schiller and Robert Schmucker, ‘Explaining the Musudan: New Insights on the North Korean SS-N-6 Technology’, May 2012.

⁶⁷ Joel S. Wit and Sun Young Ahn, ‘North Korea’s Nuclear Futures: Technology and Strategy’, U.S. Korea Institute at SAIS, Feb. 2015.

⁶⁸ Michael Elleman, ‘The Secret to North Korea’s ICBM Success’, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Aug. 2017.

⁶⁹ For example, ‘U.S. Spy Agencies: North Korea is Working on New Missiles’, Washington Post, July 30 2018; and Reuters, ‘North Koreaw Making Bomb Fuel Despite Denuclearization Pledge,’ July 25 2018 at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-usa/north-korea-making-bomb-fuel-despite-denuclearization-pledge-pompeo-idUSKBN1KF2QT.

⁷⁰ Vann H. Van Diepen and Michael Elleman, ‘North Korea Unveils Two New Strategic Missiles in October 10 Parade’, 38North, Oct 10 2020 at https://www.38north.org/author/vann-h-van-diepen/.