North Korea has just put a satellite into orbit for the first time. Does that mean an intercontinental ballistic missile is next? Not exactly.
All the data so far shows a successful space launch for Pyongyang, after firing off its Unha-3 multi-stage rocket at 7:49 p.m. EST Tuesday. So far, it appears North Korea was able to pull off two things they haven't been able to do before. One, Pyongyang's rocket appears to have hit its anticipated splashdown points, or where a rocket's jettisoned boosters land after exhausting their fuel. This implies the North Koreans now – unlike previous tests with rockets based on similar technology – have improved their ability to control where a long-range rocket can go. Second, North Korea has joined a small club of 11 other nations that have successfully launched their own payloads into orbit. There's no telling yet if Pyongyang's satellite is working and useful or not, but having sent something up is still a major accomplishment.
But translating that expertise into a working intercontinental ballistic missile program is still a ways away, experts believe. "It is definitely a step forward towards potentially having the capability. But it does not mean they have it now, nor that they are guaranteed to get it in the future," Brian Weeden, a former officer with the U.S. Air Force Space Command, e-mails Danger Room. "Last night (or this morning for them) was the first time they've gotten a long-range rocket to work right in 14 years (counting from their first attempt in 1998). One success indicates progress, but not victory."
Even so, there's been panicked talk for years in Washington about Pyongyang developing "long-range missiles that will be threatening to the United States," as the Pentagon report Ballistic Missile Review stated in 2010. While there is still a lot of uncertainty around the question of how long North Korea will need to develop an ICBM, those fears have been a major driver behind efforts by politicians to install missile defense batteries in the homeland, and boost the number of missile interceptors around the world. The problem was, for years, the North Koreans shot up nothing but duds. Now, there's a tangible step toward those fears perhaps one day coming true, even though Pyongyang still has a lot of work to do.
For one, a working rocket – which can be seen in this Chinese video spotted by NK News – is only one part of building a working ICBM, or intercontinental ballistic missile, Weeden says. ICBM launch trajectories are quite different from space launch trajectories, namely being that an ICBM has to go into space, and then re-enter the atmosphere while targeting a city on the other side of the planet. To simplify, that's really hard to do, for several reasons.
The heat and stress of atmospheric re-entry are extreme, which requires building a tough heat shield. In order to hit a city in North America, North Korea would need a much more sophisticated guidance system than they currently have, according to Victoria Samson, a rockets expert at the Secure World Foundation. Plus, "for an ICBM to be effective, it needs to carry a payload that makes launching an ICBM worth it, which means a decent-sized, heavy payload that can pack a big enough punch to merit doing so," Samson says.
But the payload can't be too big to carry. North Korea also needs a nuclear warhead that's small enough to fit on a rocket, while being reliable enough to work when they fire it. Getting all of these things right is a major technical challenge. There is also an entire physical and technical infrastructure needed to build a full-fledged weapons program, as compared to a single successful space launch with reassembled Soviet rockets.
Keeping the rockets maintained, figuring out the right fuel balance so the liquid stuff doesn't eat through your missile, monitoring the status of missiles for errors, faults, or anything else that could inhibit a launch – and, most importantly, having the right command and control in place so that you don't have an accidental launch or detonation – all of that is really tough.
"As anyone in the military will tell you, there is a huge gap between being able to do make a system work once and having a system that is reliable enough to be militarily useful," Weeden noted. "We didn't just test the first American ICBM until we got the first success and then call it a day. It took many years of focused, dedicated efforts with many tests and multiple successes to mature the technology to the point where it could be operationally useful."
How many years? Before North Korea can even be confident in having the ability to build one, Pyongyang "would probably need to conduct five or six tests to be sure," Andrew Futter, a missile defense expert at the University of Leicester, told NK News. At the current pace, that could be three years at the earliest. And then North Korea could consider it.
Another question is where North Korean rocket technology might end up next. "DPRK could sell this technology to others, including Iran and Pakistan, who have been regular customers of North Korea’s other missiles (Scud, Nodong, Musudan)," writes Victor Cha, the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The North has crossed a major threshold in terms of mating an ICBM with a nuclear weapon. They still have other technological thresholds to cross (miniaturized warheads, reentry vehicle), but this was undeniably a major one."
The launch date also took the world by surprise. When North Korea first announced it was launching the rocket in December, it originally set a launch window between Dec. 10 and Dec. 22. Just prior to the launch, however, Pyongyang announced an extension of the window to Dec. 29 and admitted the rocket's first-stage engine was having technical problems. This led a number of analysts and journalists – me included – to speculate that North Korea was being forced to delay the launch. "Sure, they expected it would happen eventually, but most everyone was blindsided when North Korea lit the fuse just one day from their delay announcement," Business Insider's Geoffrey Ingersoll noted.
The bait-and-switch could also have been carried out to intentionally head-fake the planet. "The technical glitch was either a minor one quickly fixed or just a camouflage to trick the Japanese, who have openly talked about intercepting the rocket," Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, told The New York Times. Other theories involve North Korea attempting to keep up with a growing arms race with South Korea, timing with December elections in South Korea and Japan, or simply a plea for attention. And boy, did that work.
– additional reporting by Noah Shachtman
