Rumors began circulating a week ago, starting with the Chosun Ilbo, that a North Korean propaganda film had surfaced showing a new cruise missile. I tracked down the film, entitled “백두산훈련열풍으로 무적의 강군을 키우시여,” which it turns is available on social media websites like YouTube.
It’s very long and features plenty of sweaty all-female artillery units, much to Kim Jong Un’s delight. The film also offers a very, very brief glimpse of the missile. Near the very end of the hour-long film, around 49:19, a North Korean ship launches a cruise missile.
Mystery Threat to American Warships Is Likely North Korean
More precisely, it’s a new anti-ship cruise missile
In
2013, the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet hinted at a mysterious and “newly
discovered threat” to American warships. Whatever it was, it was
serious — and had America’s admirals spooked.
We
knew the threat was probably a missile, because the Navy’s only mention
of it was inside a contracting request for a new electronics
countermeasures system designed for surface ships.
The
Navy awarded a $65-million contract to the U.S. Naval Research
Laboratory to develop the system within a “critically short” time frame.
Military & Aerospace Electronics, which first noticed the request, suggested that the threat was a radar-guided anti-ship missile from a country or terrorist group in the Middle East.
USS Nimitz, left, and USS Essex near the Hawaiian islands on July 27, 2012. Navy photo
It’s neither. The threat is most likely from a country the United States is still technically at war with — North Korea.
More precisely, the threat is probably a North Korean Kh-35 anti-ship cruise missile.
The
Navy’s hurried development of a missile-defense system, begun just a
year before the existence of the new North Korean cruise missile became
public in the West, is a window into how the Pentagon is keeping tabs on
the reclusive, hostile country — and how the U.S. responds to new
dangers.
It’s also a window
into the world of open source intelligence, where ordinary people dig
through publicly available information for nuggets of information
governments don’t necessarily want them to know.
The
Pentagon didn’t specify the exact nature of its new countermeasures
system — officially designated AN/SLQ-59. But most likely, the device
can jam the radars of anti-ship missiles. Almost every modern anti-ship
missile has a small radar that guides the weapon and helps detect
targets.
If you want to
prevent an incoming missile from sinking your ship, the best way is to
overwhelm it with electromagnetic interference. It’s easier than
shooting it down.
The Naval
Research Laboratory and defense contractor ITT Excelis had developed a
prototype of the electronic warfare system in 2012, and wanted help from
industry to field the first system by 2014. The Pacific Fleet needed up
to 24 of the systems.
So why does this have anything to do with a North Korean missile? Well, there are several reasons why.
The
Kh-35 first attracted attention outside of Western military and
intelligence circles in June 2014, when arms control expert Jeffrey
Lewis noticed something unusual in a North Korean propaganda video.
North
Korean videos typically feature action-packed montages at their very
end, sometimes with tantalizingly brief clues showing off new weapons
and capabilities.
In the
North Korean video — shortly after the 49-minute mark — there is a
brief, one-second clip of a surface ship firing a cruise missile.
The video confirms a surprising fact: the cruise missile is a copy of the Russian-produced Kh-35. Here is a comparison with a photo of a Russian KH-35 being launched from an Indian ship.
The two missiles appear to be externally identical.
But as far as the West knew when the video debuted, North Korea didn’t have any cruise missiles. Only a handful of countries make cruise missiles, and even fewer would sell them to North Korea.
The missile in the video resembles an anti-ship
missile, similar to the American Harpoon and French Exocet. The
missile’s canister launcher is visible, and although it resembles the
launcher of the Russian Kh-35 anti-ship missile, it isn’t a perfect
match.
A number of
people — myself included — volunteered to comb the Internet for clues. A
search of anti-ship missile launches on YouTube made it clear it wasn’t
a Western design. It wasn’t Chinese, either.
Plus, the footage was unique.
North Korea didn’t steal some other video of a missile and fence it off
as its own. Pyongyang may bluster and make threats, but it doesn’t
bluff regarding capabilities.
The
missile was indeed a Kh-35. Made by Russian defense contractor Zvezda,
the Kh-35 flies at Mach 0.8 at just 10 to 15 meters above the ocean
surface. It has a range of 70 miles.
It packs a 320 pound shaped-charge warhead, making it extremely dangerous to destroyer-sized ships.
Now
recall that the Navy’s request for a countermeasures system came from
the Pacific Fleet, meaning the threat was a country in the Asia-Pacific
region. The only countries even potentially hostile to the U.S. in that
region are China and North Korea.
The U.S. and China are nowhere near coming to blows — ruling out China as the source of an “urgent need.”
North
Korea, on the other hand, has attacked American and South Korean ships
before, including the 1968 seizure of the spy ship USS Pueblo and the 2010 sinking of the South Korean corvette ROKS Cheonan.
Spontaneous acts of violence are part of North Korea’s foreign policy. Defending ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet from the Kh-35 would be an urgent priority indeed.
Exactly
how and why North Korea got the Kh-35 is a good question. North Korea
and Russia have become increasingly close during the Kim Jong Un era,
and Pyongyang could have bought the missiles from Moscow.
Another
possibility is Myanmar, which has openly purchased the Kh-35 from
Russia, and has bought weapons from Pyongyang. North Korean technical
advisers have assisted Myanmar’s ballistic missile program — and may have assisted its nuclear weapons program.
It’s possible that Pyongyang received anti-ship missiles in return for weapons … or nuclear know-how.
The
Kh-35 missile connection isn’t definitive. Nobody knows for sure how
North Korea got its missiles, and it’s even possible — albeit
remotely — that they might be a totally new design.
With North Korea, it’s hard to rule out anything. But the announcement of the threat, clues about the threat and the sudden appearance of the Kh-35 is an awfully big coincidence.
We’ll
probably never know how U.S. intelligence found out about North Korea’s
Kh-35. Still, thanks to open source analysis, we civilians have a
pretty good idea they’re there — and where they might have come from.
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