North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Decker Eveleth: Scrutinizing North Korea’s nuclear missiles from the sky

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

Research analyst Decker Eveleth joins the podcast to discuss where exactly North Korea’s missile program stands today, and why it presents a security problem not only for Asia and the U.S. but for the entire globe.  He also talks about the benefits of working with open-source intelligence, such as sharing intel publicly and providing new […]

the your T-shirt celebrating DPRK's golden era of aviation in vintage airline chic. Explore the stars with our Nada hoodie, inspired by North Korea's answer to NASA. Or toast to tradition with our Taedonggang beer T-shirt, capturing the essence of North Korea's renowned brew. Each design is a conversation starter. Find yours at shop.nknews.org. Again, that's shop.nknews.org. on the the Hello podcast listeners and welcome to the NK News Podcast. I'm your host, Jacko Zwedzlut, and today we are recording on Thursday, the 22nd of August, 2024. Joining me on the line via StreamYard is Deco Everleth, who is an

associate research analyst at the CNA Corporation, a Washington-based non-profit research and analysis organization. And he studies North Korean and Chinese nuclear force structures utilizing mixed methods, including satellite imagery. You'll find him on Twitter at dex underscore eve. And we're going to talk today about North Korea's missile system. So welcome on the show Deco. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I think it's fair to say that lately lay people have stopped paying much attention to North Korea's missile development and testing and production. Too many tests make too much, too little impact, I guess. And if there's one thing that you want people to take away from this

interview about North Korean missiles, what would that be? Yeah, it's absolutely true that North Korean missiles have become more normalized. I would emphasize that North Korea is not at the stage where it's necessarily developing an experimental capability. Now we're at the stage where they have a fully functioning and deployed nuclear missile arsenal that is capable of targeting not only the United States, but South Korea, Japan, and other places in Asia. And this is a problem that is now a real deployed problem.

And it's a security problem not only for the United States, but for Asia and really the globe. Now you're working with a lot of open source satellite imagery. I'm just wondering what's the benefit of working on very specialized military intel in open source? Who does that help if we assume that the military already has better knowledge on all the stuff that we cover and write about in open source intelligence? So there are a couple of important aspects here. The first is simply the public knowledge problem. You know The United States and South Korea and Japan definitely already collect a lot of this data.

Problem is they cannot share it openly for a variety of reasons that may reveal technology you don't want to reveal, that may reveal source you don't want to reveal. And so they can't actually share this publicly. So what people like me do that helps the entire conversation is that we can say and find things and publish them. And that allows the United States to share certain data with partners.

And it allows the United States to say certain things they would not have been able to say before. So that's really one thing of sort of getting around the classification error. The other way is that we simply provide more analysis and we simply provide maybe angles or we look into things that the United States government either doesn't really have the time to do themselves or doesn't really emphasize. And so looking at very, very specific things down in the weeds of like specific, very small aspects of what of what the businesses look like, what their capabilities are, what their production facilities look like, and that sort of thing.

That also really helps the broader analysis. Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. Now you work for CNA, which was once known by the full name Center for Naval Analysis, and it's federally funded. To what extent is it independent? It's fully independent. We're an independent non-profit. We have a relationship with the government that allows us to do certain things that other companies can't do. And we are basically directly helping the Navy usually answer certain questions and certain problems by providing our expertise and providing our data and providing our help to understanding specific challenges that the Navy will encounter or the ISAF will encounter, right?

So I work on the countering threats and challenges team. We do a lot of that for, based all over the globe, helping the United States Navy plan and understand what challenges are upcoming. Okay, thank you. Now on August the 12th, NKPRO published a long analytical piece by you called How North Korea's Tactical Missile Deployment Aggravates Risks of Nuclear Use. And in the subtitle, the Hwasong 11D launches may support posture of responding to even minor conflict with mass salvos to overwhelm rock defense.

And I encourage all of our listeners to go on to NKPro if they have a subscription and read that article. But we're talking about mainly the Hwasong line of missiles. And based on my preliminary reading, we start back way back in the 1980s with the Hwasong 5 and 6, which were at that time often called Scud missiles in the early days. And now we have a lot of very the Hwasong 5 and 6, which were at that time often called SCUD missiles

in the early days. And now we have a lot of very different Hwasong missiles all the way up to the solid fuel ICBM Hwasong 18 that was tested last year. So in this article, we're focusing on Hwasong 11, of which there are several variants. And before we get into those variants, can you sort of tell us where does Hwasong 11 fit into the pantheon of all the Hwasong missiles? Right, so the 11 series encompasses a lot of different small tactical systems. They have a missile that looks like a Russian Iskander, a sort of large SRBM.

They have missiles that are smaller than that. And so that's a sort of a sleet of missiles for, you're talking about hitting targets that are 200 kilometers out, 400 kilometers out, 500 kilometers out, but not the really big systems for targeting things like places in Japan or the United States. So if you think about how we sort of categorize missile systems, you've got the ICPMs,

the Intercontinental Range-Ballistic Missiles, like the Hwasong 15, 17, 18, and then you have the sort of intermediate rung of forces, things that can hit Japan or other targets in Asia. And then you have the lowest rung of which the 11 sits in of you are talking about a very, very small, very mobile missile capable of doing tactical targeting at specific South Korea. What we have seen is that North Korea is replacing some of the sites they have used to host the medium range missiles like the Scud missile and replacing those missiles with the 11Ds. Okay, and that's the one that you're focusing on.

Okay, so I understand there's a number of these variants of the Hwasong 11 series, at least four that I could find. So there's the Hwasong 11A or 11Ga as it's called in Korean. Is that sort of the base model? I wouldn't call any of them a base model because I think that they're using the 11 umbrella to talk about more of a role and not necessarily a base model. Maybe they share some sort of common guidance components or other things, but you're talking about, I mean, the 11D is a much, much smaller missile than the 11A. I think that the designation 11, the things they have in common are they are all solid fuel, right? Right.

All solid. They can be launched very, very quickly. They may share some guidance components, we don't know. Right. But they encompass sort of a certain rung of North Korea's arsenal. Okay. Yeah. And so the Hwasong 11C, that's a larger one, which apparently has claimed to have a 2.5 ton warhead. There's also one that's underwater launched, the Hwasong 11S. And then there's the one that we're focusing on today, the Hwasong 11D. Now recently, North Korea made a big deal about deploying 250 Hwasong 11D launchers to frontline units. And we've talked about that on an earlier episode of this podcast.

Why is this a big deal? So previously North Korea deployed a number of liquid fuel systems and liquid fuel systems are very efficient. You can get high range with them. The problem is they're very, very large and they're very, very heavy. And so you have to dedicate a lot of resources to each liquid fuel system. When you switch to a solid fuel system, which is basically instead of having a liquid fuel and a liquid oxidizer,

you basically bind both your fuel and oxidizer together in some sort of acrylic usually, that allows you to launch a system very, very quickly. And you can have lots of systems that are lighter and more mobile ready to launch. So what we have seen is that North Korea has invested heavily in developing and deploying these small solid fuel systems, two quote frontline units,

in place of those larger liquid fuel systems. Why that matters is that it gives North Korea a tremendous throw away. Instead of focusing on and saying you have maybe 200 liquid-filled systems, as in missiles, now you can deploy and have at a moment's notice thousands of missiles, right? Missiles that are capable of targeting, you have the flexibility to target things as small as South Korean tactical artillery units, all the way up to strategic targets with nuclear warheads. So it's a massive fire advantage and it's a flexibility advantage.

Now the 11D, it's a smaller and has a reduced range. Why is this not a downgrade from existing missile systems? So you are sacrificing some amount of range that can be supplemented with other systems. And you are replacing that capability, or not really replacing, but moving that capability to a system that is much, much faster. The big problem that North Korea has is that it's not a very big country. It's very small. And that means that you have a tremendous problem getting your military to survive the first

28-48 hours of conflict and the problem with liquid fuel systems is that generally they have a very long prep time You have to prep the missile for launch you have to fuel it you have to tell where to go and that could take you know an hour or two and while it's doing that it has driven out to an open area and has Lifted the missile into a firing position where it's kind of obvious. The advantage with the solid fuel system is you don't do any of that. For example, the 11D doesn't actually launch at a horizontal angle. It launches at a sort of 45 degree angle. So it's a much smaller target. It's not as visible. It's quicker. And so if there's a conflict and you have, say, US and South Korean F-15s flying around trying to find missile systems, it's harder to do. And there's a lot of them. Right. And these launches that we've seen 250 of

deployed recently, they can... It's basically a big truck driving around with four of these missiles on the back and it can fire four of them in quick succession, right? Yep. Yeah, absolutely. We have seen them, we have seen Kim Jong-un go to the factories over the past six months and show off the launchers. This wasn't really a necessarily surprise. I think the surprise is how quickly they have built so many of them.

The scale is really the surprise here. And those missiles are capable of firing pretty big salvos very, very quickly in a way that can engage and overwhelm missile defense systems. Right. Okay. Now that is clearly an important challenge, a big threat too. So tell us a little bit more about overwhelming missile defense systems. So South Korea has a broad military strategy for deterring and defeating North Korea at the strategic level. And one of the important rungs of that strategy is ensuring that South Korea has the missile defense capabilities to defend critical sites. This could be major North South Korean military bases. This could be South Korean political leadership,

military leadership, or it could be the missile bases that South Korea will use to strike back at North Korea. Right? And so you have this problem, or you had a problem back in the early 2000s and 2010s in which North Korea had this big arsenal of missiles and South Korea didn't have a strong way to defeat ballistic missiles. And so it invested very, very heavily in producing that capability.

Now the problem is that you have gotten yourself into something like an arms race in which now North Korea says, well, now we're less confident in our ability to degrade South Korean military forces. So we need more missiles. And so you shift to solve fuel, you shift to having a lot of small missiles on standby, and you likely are planning to engage large salvos of those missiles to overwhelm and defeat missile defenses. And we have seen them practicing this. We have seen them repeatedly go out, get five, 10, 18 of these missile launchers. We saw them do this with the KN-25, a different

assault system. And Kim Jong-un explicitly stated that they were going to do, this is a practice salvo launch for defeating South Korean airfields. He's been very explicit about the role of this system. So is this what we call massed firepower? Yeah, you're talking about putting together these large companies and brigades of solid field systems, and you do the calculation where you say, well, maybe I can't defeat, confidently destroy the South Korean airfield with five or 10 missiles, but I can do it in 30. And so you mass enough firepower to destroy and defeat not only the strategic targets

in South Korea, like airfields and missile bases, but also maybe the tactical targets, like the artillery bunkers and short range missiles that South Korea has. And you do this by just firing off as many missiles as possible. Now, in your article, you point out some reasons why North Korea might not want to be too hasty to believe that its mass firepower of short-range missiles will overwhelm South Korea's defenses. I think you looked at Israel as an example. So tell us a bit about that. Yeah, so we did a big study, I mean, my former employer, back when I worked at the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies,

did a big study on the Iranian strikes on Israel, in which Iran fired a lot of ballistic missiles at two air bases in Israel. And what we basically discovered was that they launched, reported in the press as over 100 ballistic missiles, and they basically did negligible damage. You know, they hit they hit a support building for an F-35 hanger, they didn't hit the F-35 itself. And that was like the most damage they managed to do. achieved by the fact that Israeli and American missile defense systems were very, very successful at intercepting Iranian missiles coming in over pretty safe trajectories, and you could

basically negate the mission of the strike. And so, you know, South Korea has a big problem in that, sorry, North Korea has a big problem in that South Korean missile defense systems are pretty robust. Now you have a problem in which, well, if you were to launch 100-plus missiles to do a mission similar to the mission that Iran attempted to employ against Israel, you may not accomplish that mission because even if you don't get all the missiles, you only need to intercept enough to ruin the mission and make sure the target

that North Korea is trying to hit survives. Now, the Hwasong-11D missiles, they are nuclear capable, so they could be fitted with small nuclear warheads. These are, I presume, tactical nuclear weapons. That's what we're talking about, right? Yeah. I was wondering if you could game it out for me. What might Kim Jong-un be thinking about using

tactical nuclear missiles against South Korea? Right, so the North Koreans have revealed and shown us several times that they are producing tactical warheads for a variety of their smaller systems. And so they've talked about having nuclear cruise missiles, having nuclear short range missiles, having all these missiles that you can put basically a standard tactical warhead into.

And the reason why you might wanna do that is because if you've got a big target in South Korea and you want to destroy it, you could launch a large barrage of conventional systems at it. And what that would entail is you would need to ensure that, let's say, just purely theoretically, maybe five, 10 missiles would need to get through to destroy or degrade those bases.

The advantage of a nuclear system is that you only need one to get through, maybe two, but you don't need to think about, well, how many missiles at the conventional level would I need to hit all these bunkers? You don't have to worry about that. And so what I think the appeal for the North Koreans is going to be, and I think this is pretty well informed by both what Kim Jong-un has said, what we have seen them developing, and just putting all that together is that what you could definitely do is maybe launch a couple salvos at the conventional level to simply exhaust South Korean defenses and then launch a second salvo with nuclear warheads to ensure that you can destroy these critical targets. Right. The major problem more broadly is that missile defense has proven itself to be

very effective when you are prepared for the attack and it's been proven effective also in Ukraine, in which we have seen the Ukrainians adapt so that their missile intercept rates go up over time. You don't want that. And so because of this sort of pattern of missile defense effectiveness and defense over time, what you may want to do is if you want to maximize the effectiveness of your strike, you need to strike quickly. And you do so in a way that is overwhelming to the enemy.

And that's, that's really the problem I see with the developing secure situation, the Peninsula is that you are. You're closing off a lot of doors for off ramps for deescalation, because the window for victory or defeat is closing, right? You're going to have a situation which there's gonna be a time which if the war lasts for more than X hours or days, the likelihood of a North Korean success in that war

begins to seriously decrease over time, right? Right, and so this is why you write in your article that ironically, the robustness of South Korea's missile defense systems might actually lower the threshold for North Korea using a nuclear weapon, right? Yes, absolutely. I think that when we look at the set of problems that Kim Jong-un and the Korean People's Army Command has, we look at those options that they're looking at,

and we look at what they have developed, and we look at how they talk about their tactical systems, you start to see the problem that they are faced with and how they think about overcoming that problem. Now, I'm not going to say that we should lower the number of interceptors or do anything to stop South Korea from engaging in a missile defense. That's achievable. That's a good idea. But I do think that we need to think seriously about this problem and this conundrum that the North Koreans are in and think seriously about what they would be tempted to do in a serious crisis if they seriously thought that they were in a window in which in 24 hours they

were either going to be victorious or dead. And think about A, what sort of indicators we might see if North Korea were planning to employ that, and how do we make space for possible off-ramps in that sort of conflict? Now, on the matter of tactical or battlefield nukes in war, this is certainly something that has become more of an object of discussion in the last 10 years, but no country has actually used them yet in war. Russia hasn't yet, despite more than two and a half years of special military operations in Ukraine and lots of threats about using nuclear weapons. So what mitigates against Kim Jong-un using them in a fight against South

Korea? And what might, well, let's start with that first, I guess. You mean why might North Korea use them in Russia, isn't Russia, or something like that? Okay, let's change the question there. Why might North Korea become the first one to actually use tactical or battlefield nukes when everybody else has so far avoided it? I think what we have to look at is the fact that for Russia, the conflict over Ukraine is not yet zero sum. As long as they continue to control escalation, and as long as we continue to control escalation, there is a vanishingly small likelihood

that the conflict over Ukraine is going to end with Putin deposed or dead. The problem for North Korea and specifically Kim Jong-un is the fact that there are vanishingly few conflicts where he is not dead at the end of a Korean major conflict. And so on the peninsula, we have a problem in which conflict is short term. And because of the US and South Korea turn strategy, which explicitly makes a core tenant of their turn strategy, the death of Kim Jong-un, you know, he is faced with a problem in that he looks

around and realizes that basically any large scale engagement is either going to end up with him dead or victorious, albeit, you know, in a world of smoking ashes, but still victorious. And that's the world that he lives in. And when you have that, you know, portfolio of terrible choices to make, you're still going to take the choice that gives you the largest likelihood of surviving. Gosh, now I have a little side discussion just on arming nuclear weapons. Do you have any idea how much fissile material would be required to make a thousand tactical nuclear warheads to put atop these 1000 Hwasong 11D missiles that can realistically be deployed in the 250 launch vehicles we saw. So it's really, really difficult to make that assessment if we don't really understand

what their precise design is in terms of what their warheads are actually designed, in what way they're put together, and also just the fact that we have very limited visibility into the North Korean fissile material production facility. The United States intelligence community was famously caught extremely off guard by North Korea's ability to basically create a clandestine enrichment hole at Yongbyong. There are other facilities around Pyongyang

that are rumored to be production facility, covert production facilities. And so we have very little visibility into what that would look like. We have very little visibility into how much material they need for each individual bomb. And we have little visibility into the actual process of weaponization in North Korea. What I would say is that, as I sort of outlined, you don't really need to put nuclear warheads on all of them. You can have a force that is 75, maybe 50% conventional and the rest nuclear, and you can tailor your operations to accomplish the same mission. Now, what do we know about how North Korea, the logistics of how North Korea would

conduct nuclear arming of missiles? Perhaps you could compare to what we know about how it works in the US or China or Russia. So what kinds of missiles have nuclear warheads installed in them already or are they stored separately from the missiles? And do we think that North Korea has any nuclear equipped missiles deployed and ready for launch right missiles? And do we think that North Korea has any nuclear equipped missiles deployed and ready for launch right now? What do we know about these things? We know extremely little is that unfortunately. One problem with looking at it is that all of many,

I will say, of the North Korean missile bases engage in some pretty serious camouflage activities. And so they really, really attempt to deny the United States and South Korea and Japan the ability to have a clear view of what their operations look like. Now they have been getting somewhat more confident and we have seen things like launchers being left out more. But for things like, especially at the strategic force level of like the ICBMs, they keep all that very close to chest. And you know.

How does it normally work in other countries? The warheads normally store separately of missiles? So it really depends what your strategy is. For countries in which you are mainly engaging in second strike, like for example, what China at least used to be, and you want to have very tight control of warheads, you store them centrally. and they had logistics units that were tasked with if the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party gave the order, tasked with ferrying those warheads as quickly as possible to deployment locations. Because the underlying assumption of the Chinese arsenal was that a bolt from the blue US attack was extremely unlikely, I think that was a good assumption to make. You also have places that don't do that. So for example, Pakistan, Pakistan's strategic force posture relies on using escalation to deny the Indian conventional army, the ability to overrun Pakistani forces, because Pakistan is conventionally weaker than India. And so you

tailor your nuclear force posture and nuclear strategy to be as intentionally escalatory as possible and to be as fast as possible. And so in that case, what we do see is nuclear weapons igloos at the same location as the missile forces. So it depends on what your strategy is nuclear weapons igloos at the same location as the missile forces. Right. So it depends on what your strategy is. Right. It depends on whether or not you actually have forces totally on alert all the time, like the United States does, or if you have a very much more relaxed posture, it really depends. If we were to apply the political science methodology that we have used in the past to a country like North Korea, what the theory would predict, and this is based off the work of Vipin Naral, he has a great book on nuclear force postures you should all go read, what the

theory would predict is that North Korea would have nuclear warheads stored very, very close to the missile units or at the exact same place because you want to be as ready as possible. Okay, so that would be in line with their nuclear doctrine and what you've talked about today in podcasts about trying to overwhelm and then getting a nuclear strike if possible. podcast about trying to overwhelm and then get in a nuclear strike if possible. Working at CNA, do you have any inside scoop that suggests that Washington and Seoul are particularly worried about the threat of Hwasong-11D missiles with tactical nukes possibly deployed to frontline units now? I mean, I have an inside scoop. I'm not that senior. I mean, I do think they're very worried about it. There was a new story today or yesterday, I

think about the United States updating its nuclear weapons employment guidance to better deal with threats from Russia, China and North Korea. We have seen the South Koreans become very, very concerned about North Korea nukes in general, and demanding more reassurance from the United States. And we have seen some U.S. movement on strengthening deterrents in the region with the movement of political submarines to South Korea and that sort of thing. So I do think that Washington is very worried about this problem and they're modifying

their deterrent strategy and employment guidance to deal with the problem. And I do think that the Hwasong 11D is a serious part of that problem. And that now instead of having to simply deal with North Korean nukes at the strategic level with ICBMs and other missiles, but now we deal with it at the tactical level. You deal with a lot of missiles in tactical level, and how do you deal with that?

So yes, I think that they're very worried about it. Now, if nuclear weapons and missiles are designed to be a deterrent rather than actual offensive weapons, is there really all that much to fear? I mean, surely nobody is suicidal enough to start a second Korean war, particularly by looking at how badly Russia is doing in Ukraine. Why is it so dangerous? So, I mean, in order to deter, you need to have a credible capability

to inflict damage, right? And so very few countries have really adopted and take into heart this idea that deterrence weapons are only for deterrence. I mean, you could argue that China sort of did in the 80s and 90s, well, that's a hot topic, but in order to effectively deter, you need to have a credible force structure

that can save the opponent. Hey, if you do this thing, you will lose more than I will lose, right? You will not come out of this as the victorious party. And so I do think that the missiles for North Korea play that important deterrence role. And I think that it gives North Korea and Kim Jong-un the confidence that they have the capability to perhaps survive a conflict. And so I do think that we have to worry about this problem of perhaps Kim Jong-un feeling confident enough that he isn't going to start a major conflict.

I don't think that Kim Jong-un is going to do that. But I think that he will maybe think that he can get away with a little provocation without escalation. And the thing I worry about is him not getting away with it without escalation. One problem we have is that we in the United States obviously have a very strong hand in any crisis on the Korean

Peninsula, but I think a lot of Americans sort of write out the fact that South Korea also has this very, very large missile arsenal. And then this arsenal is designed to both deter and to degrade the North Korean arsenal. That force structure is designed to deter and degrade those forces. And we also know that the last time that, not the last time, but one of the major times that North Korea did provoke South Korea by sinking a South Korean Navy corvette, the United States had to step in and convince

the South Korean president not to strike back. What I really worry about is this world in which North Korea feels confident that they can get away with those sort of provocations for political gain, and South Korea engaging in their deterrent strategy and what they've said they're going to do and striking back in a way that makes the North Koreans panic. Right. What options do South Korea and the US working together have to deal with this threat or to de-escalate? I think the biggest part is going to be just being extremely clear with signaling. Right. I do not think we should let a world develop in which the North Koreans think we should let a world develop in which the North Koreans are guessing what we're going to do.

I think the big thing is making sure we have communication with North Korea and making sure that the North Koreans are fully aware so that they don't panic and think that the United States is going to launch an attack or anything like that. This is partly why I think that North Korea developing satellite reconstituted building is a good thing, right? Because that lets them see what normal US operating patterns look like and then lets them have more visibility into what our forces do on a day-to-day basis and that inherently lowers the risk that they're gonna you know panic about anything. So I think that's the big

thing. I think we need to make sure that we have a very cohesive signaling plan in place so that we have very clearly communicatable options to make sure that North Koreans don't panic. Is it harder to communicate and signal these things clearly to North Korea since there really haven't been any discussions or dialogues since the middle of 2019? I think so, yes. And I think that North Korea is also very aware of the

fact that the US political system results in serious changes maybe every four years. And they're very aware of the fact that the person they're talking to could be different in a year and that also plays into a spin into their calculus and how they think about it. And so that's why I think given the level of perhaps uncertainty that our own political system generates, we need to have very clear signaling options and communicate those very effectively, although it's very difficult to communicate with North Koreans. We need to have that in place and also make sure that, as we have been doing with the deterrence guidelines,

making sure that the United States and South Korea are on the same page about what we're doing, why we're doing it, and making sure that we're very clear and decisive about signaling. Based on your analysis of satellite photography, are we seeing signs of larger upgrades of North Korea's missile bases yet? Something perhaps like what China has done? Or is it just the geography of North Korea? You know, North Korea is smaller, it's much more mountainous. Does that lead to a different approach?

Yeah, so their approach is very different than China's because China has a different view of escalation. China is very worried about and very focused on making sure that basically their personal are happy and they care about morale a lot in peacetime and so they can build these very big bases close to major cities. The North Koreans don't do that. They have, they try and make sure that all of their bases

are as hard to detect as possible. And so it's very difficult to think about and sort of gauge and judge upgrades to North Korean field deployment sites. With this particular example of the location I found where they were taking out SCUDs and putting in the Hwasong 11Ds, there hasn't been a lot of major changes to the infrastructure. We have seen them take out things to support the older liquid fuel systems,

but beyond that, not a lot. So it's very difficult to judge, partly because so much of their forced postures underground, how they are modifying their bases to accommodate for these new missiles. So are many of the missile bases themselves underground or are they more likely to be in a remote mountain valley? So usually what they do is they have their support facilities above ground and then they have either deep tunnels for hiding missiles or they'll

have basically a drive-through tunnel. So you have basically a very large mound that you drive through. They're over both ends. And so that you can hide your missile systems, your main missile systems, without the United States seeing it. Right. They're sort of spread out across a lot of remote areas in North Korea, areas away from population centers. It's again, very difficult to get a good grip on exactly what they're doing and what their

data operations look like. Do we know whether North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missiles are actually deployed? Roughly. There are a series of bases that are up north close to the Chinese border that look a little different, although not that much different. And we, I think for good reason, have assessed that those are probably the places where the ICBMD deployed, partly just because the tunnels are bigger. But again, they are very, very cagey

about leaving launchers out. They're very, very cagey about showing any of their actual wartime deployment exercises or anything like that. But it used to be, or probably still is, is that North Korea would deploy their tactical systems or maybe smaller missiles close to the South Korean border. And then once you get up North, you get to the strategic forces.

And that's based partly on declassified documents from the United States intelligence community and what they've been saying publicly, that sort of thing. Coming back to what you were saying earlier about the importance of the United States and South Korea being clear in their messaging, why do you think North Korea doesn't deploy things openly and let us know what's deployed and what's out there? Why is North Korea not so transparent in its signaling and messaging? Because the more information you release, the better idea your adversaries have of where you're deploying things, what their maintenance cycles look like, whether or not missiles are likely to be operational or unoperational based on cycles of

maintenance and operation, and that gives your adversary a lot of information that they can use to effectively target you. Right, so this is a balance that I think Russia and China have to strike at you. Right? So this is a balance that I think Russia and China have to strike repeatedly, where China actually uses a lot of data, but that's because they are not concerned about the United States striking their forces in peacetime. Right? So in peacetime, the Chinese release a lot of data about what their forces look like actually on TV and propaganda and stuff like that, because China is very big, and it's hard to get those sites and then once the crisis starts, those all go to outlying areas of China. But again, the problem is that North Korea is very, very small. The travel time for missiles, the travel time for jet aircraft is not that long. Any information that they release about

what their operations look like will potentially give the United States, South Korea the cutting edge and the data they need to effectively degrade and destroy the forces that North Korea is trying to hide. But also that kind of information could have a deterrent effect in and of itself, couldn't it? Yes. I think that they are trying to establish deterrence with their missile tests, right? Because that's a sort of, now it's pretty unescalatory, actually, because as we said

before, you know, that there isn't really a lot of attention going to the tests anymore. And you can do them from sites we already know about, right? That's why North Korea tests ICBMs from places like the International Airport, because it's just a place that we already know about. And there, they don't really try to hide their operations. They have built a maintenance area for ballistic missiles at the airport. And that's, you could look at it and you're like, yep, that's the main area of ballistic missiles.

They're trying to hide that because that's just a test site. Don't worry about that being an operational capability. So I think that's the way that North Korea is attempting to establish deterrence is by showing you the capability and showing you combined with test launches and then the events that Kim Jong-un, for example, the unveiling of the 250 launchers, saying, hey, we have this capability, we've launched before, you've seen us do it. Here's how many launches we have. They can't tell us where they are, or, you know, whatever, but they can establish a turn pretty effectively, I think, by doing those two things.

Yeah. If you look at South Korea in satellite imagery, you can see large vehicle pools at military bases where hundreds of tanks and vehicles and other equipment are stored. Are there things like this in North Korea or are they really all hidden underground or under some type of camouflage or in tunnels? It's mostly hidden. Some of the things like artillery units and anti-air units are easier to find. But for most of it, especially like armored units, that sort of thing, you're really looking at a series

of tunnels and other defensive installations that are built to hide your system from both detection and attack. And that also makes your job quite a challenging one, then doesn't it, in analyzing this sort of photography? This is true. North Korea is definitely the most difficult open source intelligence target probably on the planet

because they're so closed off. They don't have outside internet at all. They don't publish a lot and their forces are just hard to detect. All right, last question for you. Is there anything else that you're looking at these days in terms of North Korea from the sky that we haven't talked about today that's also important?

Well, I think the big thing that will sort of repeatedly prop its head up going forward is the fact that they're doing so much work modernizing their space launch capability. They're spending a lot of time and money modernizing their space launch sites at Sohae, and we can see them doing that. They built a new test site. They modernized their old launch site. They're building a lot of supporting infrastructure for that. And then they're also modernizing, and you can see this from space,

you can see them modernizing facilities related to their space situational awareness for things like satellite control. And that's actually a good example of how we can look and use open source to determine focus areas of foreign countries is that we see them developing all this technology and developing all these facilities to have a constellation of space capabilities. And I think that's going to be a big problem going forward in that in 10, 20 years, we're looking at a North Korea that possibly with Russian assistance,

so I hesitate to say anything concrete about that, is going to have their own constellation of satellites for communications, reconnaissance, imaging, which is going to give North Korea possibly a lot more options in terms of what it can see and how it communicates with their own force structure. Wow, okay, gosh, that's certainly very serious things and kind of a grim note to finish up on, but again, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today, Decker Everleth. No problem, thanks for having me. And our listeners can find you on Twitter at dex underscore eve. So thanks again and all the best. We'll have you on again sometime in the future.

Thank you. Looking forward to it. Welcome to a new realm of insights into the Korean Peninsula. At Korea Risk Group, we delve deep into the complexities of North and South Korea, offering bespoke analyses that empower decision makers. Whether you're in government, business or academia, our tailored solutions provide clarity in an opaque region.

Let our team guide your strategy with data-driven insights and on-the-ground intelligence. Step into a world of informed decision making and visit careerriskgroup.com today. Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of our podcast episode for today. Our thanks go to Brian Betts and Alana Hill for facilitating this episode and to our post-recording producer genius, Gabby Magnuson, who cuts out all the extraneous noises, awkward silences, bodily functions, and fixes the audio levels. Thank you, and listen again next time.