North Korea News Podcast by NK News - North Korea’s attack drill, Wonsan Kalma slowdown and Google’s blurry maps

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

This week, NK News Senior Analytical Correspondent Colin Zwirko joins the podcast to break down North Korea’s latest missile drill, which combined ballistic missiles, 600mm multiple rocket launchers, cruise missiles and attack drones in a coordinated strike on a single target. Colin explains what the exercise reveals about Pyongyang’s growing ability to integrate different weapons […]

Hello and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm Alana Hill and today is Tuesday, September the 15th. This week we're talking North Korean missiles, drones, a mostly empty beach resort and thanks to Google, some newly blurry military bases. To make sense of all that, I'm joined today in studio by NK News Senior Analytical Correspondent Colin Zwerko. Colin, welcome back. Hello. So Colin, let's start with Saturday's missile launch. South Korea initially told us that North Korea had a lot. fired several ballistic missiles from around the Wansan area, but then when state media

eventually published its account on Monday, we learned that this was much broader than a straightforward ballistic missile test. Tell us what exactly did North Korea launch and what stood out to you the most when you were looking through those photos? Yeah, so North Korea finally reported on a missile test on Monday morning. They went three missile tests in a row without offering us any kind of report with details or photos. So those three tests were in August. So, yeah, they reported it two days late. So the test was on Saturday.

They reported it on Monday. It showed five different missile systems or five different weapon systems being launched against a single island off the northeast coast. So basically there were short-range ballistic missiles and then the 600-millimeter kind of like ballistic missiles. It's just a different system, multiple launch, rocket system, rockets, all fired from a beach south of Wonsan. And so those traveled about 235 kilometers to strike the island that we've identified. They use this island all the time as a target and it was famously

called North Korea's most hated rock because it gets used all the time. It gets hit with missiles all the time. I'm assuming no one lives. No. And so those two systems were fired from there. We don't know where the cruise missiles were launched from. That's the third system. And all three of those systems are ones that North Korea has said in the past can be equipped with nuclear warheads. There was no mention of the nuclear aspect of this. They called them like tactical cruise missiles in the state media report. And then so the final two systems are two different types of drones, small combat drones, what North Korea likes to call suicide drones. So those two were launched from just 35, I think 35 kilometers west of the island on the coast of Kimchek City.

So all of those in the photos are depicted in just one, a couple of still photos to have struck the island at around the same time. So what they're trying to demonstrate to us is this ability to coordinate launches between multiple systems and units. So if Kim Jong-un gives the order or if a judge... general gives the order, they can all be set up and launch to strike a target at around the same time. Let's talk about that coordination a bit more because as you've just said on, these were five different systems. So there was the Huasang 11A ballistic missile, 600 millimeter, multiple

rocket launchers, a Huassal series cruise missile and then these two different types of attack drones. Is it unusual for us to see these different systems being brought together into the one exercise? North Korea has been doing this more and more in the last few years, actually, where they launch a bunch of different, or at least two different types of missiles at the same time. And then what we get every time now is South Korean media will come out, or South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff, the South Korean military, will come out and say something very vague, like we detected a few missiles or we detected 10-odd missiles. And then what we'll see from North Korea is that it was much more complicated than that.

So there is an issue here, I think, that we're starting to see, which is that South Korea is unable to alert the public about the accuracy, with accuracy about what these tests are. I think North Korea is trying to understand South Korea's detection capability. And the point, obviously being is to be able to get a launch off multiple systems and to have. that attack survive missile defenses. So if the ballistic missiles are shut down, well, the cruise missiles might survive. And if they're all launched at once, it gives the South Korean military a lot more to deal with at once. So maybe South Korean military is handling it better than we understand through just their alerts about the missiles in real time. But the purpose seems clear from North Korea. And yeah, a lot of missile tests these days are like that with multiple systems at

once. Could we say that this might be a tactic by the South Korean military not to basically let on that they are able to detect these different weapon systems so that North Korea thinks that it could have a launch undetected? I don't know. I think there's already a debate there about what South Korea says and when they say it, they alert the public to these missile tests and call them a provocation every time. South Korea tests their own missiles, Korea doesn't detect them or doesn't talk about detecting them. There probably is a big capability gap there in terms of if they're able to detect them because they don't have the type of assets that the U.S. and South Korea have in terms of

satellite and other detection capabilities. So I don't know if it's worth really thinking too deeply about that. I think just the more interesting debate is should South Korea keep on alerting the public about these missile tests? Should they give us more information? If they're going to alert us about them, should they? maybe elaborate a bit more. Yeah. Well, Colin, sticking with South Korea's initial assessment, your geolocation, it produced a bit of an interesting discrepancy with that first reporting from

Seoul. So the South Korean military said that the ballistic missiles traveled around 250 kilometers, but then you went ahead and matched the launch site to a beach in Anjong County, and the likely target island appears to about 235 kilometers away. First of all, how do you identify? identify those locations and then how significant is that is that different you know to us it might sound like a couple of kilometers but is that a big deal I think if that's truly the the final assessment if 250 kilometers was the final assessment then yeah it's a significant difference of about 15 kilometers it's it's different this type of assessment and notifying is is different than if a missile was incoming towards South Korea, the ability to calculate its trajectory,

if it's a ballistic missile would probably be better than that. If it's a cruise missile, you don't know where that's going. You have to track it in real time. So I don't think it's that important. It's not that. The implications aren't that huge for that discrepancy, just being that it was a test from the East coast towards the northeast of North Korea. Yeah. But yeah, we're just working off a single or a couple of images, still images from North Korean media.

So this is a, it wasn't that difficult to find this beach because they use this beach for missile tests a lot. At least two previous times were photographed. And I think they used it in August, just based on satellite imagery, some, some, what, there were, there were missile tests in August that North Korea ever reported on, right? So, yeah, there are signs they maybe were using that same beach in August. So I look at it a lot and I can just recognize the way it looks because North Korea has shown it before. And then so you just go into Google Earth and just try to match up the geographical features around it between Google Earth and the photo. But again, it's just a single photo or a couple of photos. They didn't show us any video.

You always have to be aware or you always have to think maybe they're manipulating these images. Maybe there weren't that many. They showed like five of the 600 millimeter system lined up on the beach launching at once. They're not incapable of doing this, but of course it's not the full story, just these photos. Sticking with what state media showed and what it didn't show, Kim Jong-un was notably absent from the state media report. Should we read anything into Kim not being there? I don't think it's that clear-cut the reasons that they do this, but they do this a lot. I think Kim was probably there, or he was definitely guiding it from afar.

They didn't report this in domestic state media, as far as we know. It wasn't in the main newspaper or on state television. So it seems like they're reporting this for the benefit of foreign adversaries and maybe friends, like Russia maybe to show the capabilities and maybe to the enemies as a warning, because it came right off the heels of the latest joint drills between the U.S., South Korea, and Japan. So it's not that North Korea wants to hide military activity or the priority on military spending from the public because they do that all the time anyways. They just did it a couple weeks ago with the launching of this large warship and showing of its missiles. They showed that in domestic state media.

So it's not that they want to prevent this military promotion. It's just I always tend to think it's just the timing. maybe that week the propaganda priority was more on domestic issues and they just don't want to disrupt that with the missile report it's it's tough you can't make you can't draw like big conclusions it's more of i think it's just a nuance maybe just that week something well let's move from north kore's military modernization to one of kim jenland's biggest civilian prestige projects you've been tracking the oncean calma coastal tourist area through satellite imagery and it looks like the resort has already went down its second summer season. Colin, what does the interview show us about when the

resort was actually busy this year? The resort, if you remember, is gigantic. It's like over 50 hotels. It's five miles long or five miles long. I'm confusing kilometers and miles, but it's huge. It would take like hours to walk across the whole thing. And a lot of the, well, there was evidence at the beginning whenever they started construction back in 2018. It just opened last year, by the way. So there was seven years of construction in Wansan. There was evidence at the beginning that it had foreign investors. They had Chinese business people on site. They were shopping it to Chinese investors. So there was always speculation that this had, the purpose of this place was to earn foreign currency, so to speak, and to attract foreign tourists. But then once COVID hit,

North Korea shut its borders, and they still haven't reopened to foreign tourism except for handfuls of Russians for political reasons, not really tourism. So the idea now after two seasons, two summer seasons, is that it's mostly a domestic-focused asset, you know? So the first season in 2025, they just opened it in June officially, And then we started to see the parking lots fill up with buses, just like a couple hundred buses, probably five, eight thousand people maximum that these can hold for about 50 days last year. And this year was about the same. So we're talking peak operations for about 50 days.

Considering how huge this place is, it's not what you would expect. in maybe other countries. We know that it's operating outside of those 50 days. It's just that's whenever they run their group tours. So that's whenever the North Korean government is organizing or the North Korean organizations are allowed to organize their group tours to the resort.

So it's hard to make clear calculations about what this all means in terms of how many people. Is it up to their 20,000 people per day capacity that they've claimed? I think the point is just we can learn a lot about what the purpose of this resort is for the propaganda and for loyalty, for the government's priority on keeping people in line and giving them something like a reward. It's almost like the island, like that sci-fi movie, you know, it's like if they have this chance of going to this paradise,

which they see on TV, maybe they'll work harder. And state media is quite clear about that connection. And so, yeah, learning that that's kind of the purpose of it, at least for now, is quite interesting, I think. Before we talk a little bit more about the propaganda aspect of Wansan Khama, I want to ask you about those hostels and hotels, because you mentioned that there was about 50 hotels, but we know that many of them were unfinished when the resort actually opened last year.

Did you see anything this summer that suggested that the accommodation capacity has expanded? No, I mean, I think the number that North Korea gave us was probably their ideal number once everything is open. It's been a while since I tried to count rooms, but the 20,000 number is a number that I think that they've given out. I think it's been promoted through Russian tour agencies, so I think it's some kind of official number. Even though one time they also said the capacity was 40,000.

So it's a bit confusing. Yeah, it's not clear exactly how many rooms and how many beds there are. But there wasn't a difference in the number of buses, a maximum capacity this year. So I don't know if we can really draw conclusions about the hotel's opening. I think that there's a potential for a lot more people to be visiting here. I don't think they're reaching this capacity yet. So I think it's possible, though, still try to bring in foreign tourists in the future. But for now, somehow they're managing the cost of operating this place, all the materials that they need to. There's a lot of stuff they need to import,

they're managing that just with running it as a domestic operation. And you'll have a lot of rich North Koreans coming in on their own trips, and that's going to bring in revenue. Going back to the propaganda benefits of this, because one of the most interesting aspects I think of your reporting is actually, as we've touched on, who appears to be getting access. So you just mentioned rich North Koreans might be going. State propaganda has called once on a gift from Kim Jong-un for the entire population.

But then we've also seen Rodang Shinmoon describe factories and mines sending their high-performing workers there as a reward for exceeding their production quotas. Is this resource then, you know, partly functioning as an incentive for workers in North Korea? Yeah, definitely. It's, I think that they're, I think it's consistent with the system in the country. They do present it as something. and the benevolent leader and the government provided this for the people. But that doesn't, I think North Koreans would know that it doesn't mean everyone can go all the time. But when you crunch the numbers, the capacity of this place, it just has a limit.

It would take 20 years for everyone to go there, North Koreans, if the summer season is like this. So short. So the numbers themselves tell the story that this is a, there's a limited. amount of people that can go there each year. And North Korea is the state media has been clear about it being a reward. It hasn't said explicitly, you can only go there if you're high performing. But it does say that that's a big, like one option, one way that people get to go there. So it seems to me quite clear that it's a place where you can go if you pay, if you have the

means, and there are a lot of North Koreans that have the means now, or you go as part of an organized trip through your school or your workplace. And that means you or your unit did well, exceeded the quotas. Well, let's talk about a bit more the economic aspect of this, Colin. Because as you just mentioned, yeah, if you have the money, you can go and pay. And when once on Kama was initially being built, they obviously, as you've said, had foreign tourism in mind. But we haven't seen that play out at all. Can a resort of this size, again, absolutely massive.

Can it make sense economically if it's just mainly hosting domestic tour groups and workers who have exceeded their quotas each summer? It depends on how much money the government is on it, I guess, allocates towards it because the government gets a lot of money these days through its crypto schemes and other foreign currency earning schemes. And if it can, it earns that money abroad, if it uses that money abroad to purchase. things abroad that are then shipped into North Korea and that can continue to be used at this resort or you're just replenishing it with domestic food and stuff like that. Sure. It's just about maintenance. You know, can you get the stuff for things that break the foreign equipment and infrastructure and stuff like that? So I think it's possible. I'm not an expert on the North Korean economy. So I don't, I don't know precisely. But there's a lot, I mean, there's the common refrain about,

about the North Korean labor being a different concept to what we think of it as. And yeah, there is a lot of money being exchanged at this place. So there is earning. Some of these hotels are earning. Yeah. We'll have to tune back in this time next year to see how summer 2027 does that once on calma. Yeah, I mean, there's no sign that they'll start letting in foreign tourists yet. And I think the bigger thing, which we don't have to get into now, is just,

who would go there. Our colleague tells me about how many Russians go to Vietnam every year. And it's like what in the tens of thousands or something and doesn't seem to be much interest in the tour packages to North Korea. So I don't know. Well, finally for today, I want to turn to something that affects how we actually investigate North Korea and the Korean Peninsula from outside. Google Maps and Google Earth have started obscuring satellite imagery of South Korean military facility. and the South Korean side of the DMZ. Colin, tell us exactly what Google has changed.

So Google now, it looks like they are blurring satellite imagery of the DMZ and US and South Korean military bases everywhere across South Korean territory. What they've really done, it seems is that they've just deleted all their images. of these places, just cut them out. And then all that's left is this base image from the 1980s, like a Lansat image, which is not detailed. So, yeah, it's tough. We were able to view on Google any U.S. and South Korean military base for the longest time. And it's, we don't have to get into all the details about why they've done this, but basically it's just in order to get something they need from South Korea in order to operate in South Korea, they needed to comply with this regulation that they didn't have to before because they weren't, they're not beholden to the South

Korean laws and regulations otherwise. It's just a deal, really, a deal they made to get what they need. So, but South Korean maps have always covered up bases and parts of the DMZ with fake forestry imagery. So now it's just, it's inconvenient sometimes. Even just today, I was looking at a North Korean military training base and I was looking at a what looks like a mock guard post, a mock South Korean guard post that they would use for infiltration drills. And I'm thinking, oh, is this design specifically based on a South Korean guard post design? And I go to Google Maps And, ah, well, you can't look at it anymore. You can't use it to compare and learn things anymore.

They've hidden this from us. You can still use Japanese Yahoo Maps is the one that I found that has the best freely available satellite imagery of these bases in South Korea. And as your article mentions, Colin, this is something that's only happened. It seems like relatively recently. Are any of those satellite images archive? Could you just look up that guard post that you wanted to see a month ago or six weeks ago? Is there images of that online still? No, the way that Google Maps and Google Earthwork are, they're not like,

I don't know the technical terms here, but if you go to the archive.org version of it, you can't interact with it in the way you'd would another, like, static website. Right, right. So, yeah, our options are not limited. Like we have archives of other satellite imagery providers that aren't freely available to the public, like Planet Labs, which we use a lot on our website for my satellite imagery stories. Or things like Airbus or MaxR imagery, they still have those archives, but that's scattered locations. So it's a huge loss, I think, actually. And there's not much we can do about it.

Let's talk a bit more about why it is a big loss, especially for a company like ours, because from a national security perspective, I think the logic is fairly straightforward. You know, Seoul doesn't want North Korea or other enemies studying detailed satellite imagery of military installations. But as your article points out, Google imagery has been extremely useful for independent scrutiny. Colin, can you give us some examples of investigations that are now going to be just much harder or maybe impossible under these new restrictions. Yeah, I mean, one thing is trying to understand what North Korea is targeting, what they're practicing. They do have a, like I mentioned earlier, they do have a lot of these mock facilities that they

build in order to practice infiltration of South Korean sites. And we're not able to compare those anymore. We're not able to find what they might be referencing, unless. we use. I mean, there's still providers out there that do it. But Google Earth was nice because you could track back, you had 20 plus years of imagery of a certain place and you could look at it over time. We can't track South Korea's, I mean, again, the counterarguments of most of these is like, well, maybe you shouldn't be looking at it in the first place or whatever. But I reject that. I think we have the right to look at it. And we still can in some platforms like Yahoo, just to learn

what they're doing, what this democratic government is doing with their facilities. This isn't really our field because we're looking at North Korea. But South Koreans might want to know how money is being spent on their military bases. I don't know. It's harder to argue that in this forum right here. But yeah, I think the big thing is right now I'm looking at what North Korea is doing on the DMZ, how they're building up on the DMZ. It's all in the news these days, you know, you would have heard of it on our slide and other sites, North Korea is re-fortifying the DMC. Well, what is South Korea doing in response to that? People aren't going to be able to figure that out very easily anymore, unless you have

like Planet Labs or something like that. So I think that's a, these are important questions that they make more difficult to answer. On another really interesting potential unintended consequence here is by selectively blurring these sense of locations, it kind of. kind of could be said that Google is essentially providing a map of what South Korean Southern government considers sensitive. This is something that jumped out to me straight away because if I'm looking at a Google satellite image of South Korea, is it not super obvious then where these sensitive sites are? Yeah, I think the best way to think about this is

what if Bidu maps, Chinese map service, suddenly, when you zoom in on North Korea, what if suddenly they had a bunch of obviously blurred places all across the country? How happy would I be that I'm like, oh, here's an updated map of everything North Korea finds sensitive. I think probably like half the country at least should be blurred because they have so many military bases. But it's, you know, the counter argument would be like, well, we have to protect our own no matter. We have to protect our sites, assuming North Korea would have known them anyway or something like that. But it's still, there's a potential that you've just given away a place that wasn't known. And there's always that potential.

And then you can just cross-reference it using Yahoo Maps. So, you know, it's the dry sand effect. I wonder do they also blur random, totally random places that aren't sensitive to try and throw North Korean intelligence off the scent of it as well? I mean, that's what I would do. Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. I don't know. I haven't gone through Google Maps to see everything that's blurred, but it would be, there's a project for one of you out there.

I wonder there's the NK News Office blurred. Well, Colin, before we go, I think all three of these stories, they really come back to the same problem, which is trying to work out what North Korea is actually doing from limited and sometimes deliberately curated information. What do these examples tell us about how much we can, to learn from open source imagery and state media. And also, like, where the biggest blind spots remain?

Well, the lack of information from coming out of North Korea these days about their tests and their, they do fewer public inspections. Kim Jong-Gun does fewer public inspections of military sites compared to some years ago. It's the lack of people that are in the country. bringing out information, videos, photos, stuff like that, it means that cross-referencing is harder. So even if I still have access to satellite imagery and can look at a bunch of different places that I can tell

based on signatures are suspicious, it's very difficult to find out what the name of this place is and what they build, what kind of weapons they make, if we're talking about factories, or what kind of weapons are based at a certain place. So that's what North Korea has going, for them is this lack, even if we can look at them from the sky, the cross-reference material is few and far between. So that's a big blind spot that jumps out to me. Well, Collins-Zuriko,

senior analytic correspondent for NK News, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. And that brings us to the end of today's episode. Our thanks to Brian Betts and David Choi for helping make this podcast happen. For more reporting, analysis, and exercise. insight on North Korea, visit NK News for the latest stories and NKPro for deeper analysis, data and research tools. You can also watch this episode on YouTube and be sure to follow us on social media for the latest updates, clips and behind the scenes content. I'm Alana Hill. Thank you for listening and we'll be back next time with more on the stories shaping North Korea.