North Korean WMD: A Guide to Online Resources

North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are the topic du jour in the WMD world, but if you’re trying to get smart about the subject, where should you turn? The amount of material never gets any smaller, and you’ve nearly got to be an expert in your own right to judge what’s what.

I won’t try to catalogue and evaluate everything out there. Instead, I’d like to point out a handful of good things, say why I think they’re good, and note any concerns or qualifications. My emphasis will be both on recent, up-to-date publications and on older materials of enduring value. I’m also sticking with what’s openly accessible online, in English. A survey of the published literature is out of scope for today, and I’m not qualified to sift works in Korean, Japanese, etc. The focus, furthermore, will be on Weapons of Mass Destruction, with one partial exception: materials concerning how the regime functions and sees the world. That tells us, among other things, why WMD are so important to Pyongyang.

Obviously this is not a comprehensive list, and it represents only my own judgments. Also, I have no intention of keeping this page up to date. What you see is what you get! Enjoy.

The single most comprehensive resource

• The NTI North Korea WMD country profile.  A sprawling collection of useful material, updated a few times a year: nukes, chem, bio, missiles, production facilities, the whole deal. Caveat: It’s so big that it can’t easily be reviewed and refreshed in its entirety as new information comes to light. But by the same token, it’s the single resource that’s closest to exhaustive.

The missile program

• The NTI/CNS North Korea missile test database. Created and maintained by Shea Cotton and colleagues and first released in April 2017, this is most current and complete publicly available dataset on North Korean missile tests and space launches.
• Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., “A History of Ballistic Missile Development in the DPRK,” CNS Occasional Paper No. 2, Nov. 1999. Although this paper is getting long in the tooth, I still find myself returning to it.
• Daniel A. Pinkston, “The North Korean Ballistic Missile Program,” Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, Feb. 2008. This one is also getting old, but is particularly valuable for its look at North Korean science and technology, which remains under-examined in English-language publications.
• Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., “DPRK Ballistic Missile Infrastructure: The Tae-sung Machine Plant,” KPA Journal, Vol. 2, No. 5, May 2011. A good look at North Korea’s primary missile-building complex, at least for liquid-fueled missiles.
• Joshua Pollack, “Ballistic Trajectory: The Evolution of North Korea’s Ballistic Missile Market,” Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, July 2011. Pretty much what the title says: a reconstruction of the changing patterns of North Korean ballistic missile exports. [Caveat: This was written just as missile-related exchanges with Burma/Myanmar were starting to come to light, and it doesn’t capture that story.]
• Jeffrey Lewis, Melissa Hanham, and Amber Lee, “That Ain’t My Truck: Where North Korea Assembled Its Chinese Transporter-Erector-Launchers,” 38North.org, Feb. 3, 2014. A virtuoso sleuthing effort, identifying the specific building inside North Korea where its first ICBM launch vehicles were assembled. This is not easy to do!
• Twitter. Some of the best high-resolution photographs and rapid analysis of North Korean missile displays and tests can be found here. Some of the most active feeds belong to Tal Inbar, Xu Tianran, Joseph Dempsey, Dave Schmerler, Melissa Hanham, Scott LaFoy, Ankit Panda, and Nathan J. Hunt.
• David Wright’s blog posts at AllThingsNuclear.org. Lately, as North Korea has begun testing missiles of longer ranges, it has been “lofting” them, that is, shooting them higher than normal, so they fall well short of their maximum range, and don’t land in Japan or fly over it. David Wright has been rapidly doing the math to estimate their full range.
• The ArmsControlWonk podcast. North Korean missile tests are a regular feature here, in discussions usually featuring Jeffrey Lewis, Aaron Stein, and Scott LaFoy.

The nuclear program

• Mary Beth Nikitin, “North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons: Technical Issues,” Congressional Research Service report RL34256, Apr. 3, 2013. This report cries out for an update, but it covers just about everything you want to know through early 2013. It’s probably the single best resource as of that date.
• Daniel Wertz and Matthew McGrath, “North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” National Committee on North Korea, Jan. 2016. In the absence of an update from Nikitin, this eight-page brief must do! It covers a great deal.
• Balazs Szalontai and Sergey Radchenko, “North Korea’s Efforts to Acquire Nuclear Technology and Nuclear Weapons: Evidence from Russian and Hungarian Archives,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 53, August 2006. A remarkable collection of translated archival materials from the Cold War. More documents have since become available at the Wilson Center Digital Archive. This is not a casual read, but it’s essential for serious researchers.
• Choe Sang-hun, “North Korea Learning to Make Crucial Nuclear Parts, Study Finds,” New York Times, Sep. 23, 2013. A look at North Korea’s efforts toward reducing dependence on imported equipment and materials for uranium enrichment, a strategy with implications for other strategic programs as well.
• Jeffrey Lewis and Nathaniel Taylor, “North Korea’s Nuclear Year in Review—And What’s Next,” NTI.org, Dec. 20, 2016. This feature includes an extraordinary 3-D interactive map and VR tour of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site. It starkly concludes that North Korea is preparing for a very large number of underground nuclear tests, and has the option of conducting much larger tests than before.
• Frank Pabian and David Coblentz, “North Korea’s Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site: Analysis Reveals Its Potential for Additional Testing with Significantly Higher Yields,” 38North.org, Mar. 10, 2017. A more detailed analysis that nicely complements the previous item in this list.
• David Albright, Sarah Burkhard, Mark Gorwitz, and Allison Lach, “North Korea’s Lithium 6 Production for Nuclear Weapons,” ISIS-online.org, Mar. 17, 2017. A study that uses North Korean scientific literature, among other sources, to assess the country’s progress toward making hydrogen bombs.

Nuclear military strategy 

• Max Fisher, “The Hidden Messages in North Korea’s Military Parade,” NYTimes.com, Apr. 18, 2017. An evaluation of the roles of the array of missiles, new and old, displayed in Pyongyang this April 15.
• Bonnie Berkowitz, Laris Karklis, and Tim Meko, “North Korea showed off a lot of missiles. What might be its targets?“, WashingtonPost.com, May 18, 2017. The authors take up the flip side of the coin, looking into specific targets for nuclear strikes. Both of these features avoid the jargon of Western nuclear strategy (“counterforce” and “countervalue”), allowing the authors to try to assess North Korea’s approach on its own terms.

Chemical and biological weapons

• “North Korea’s Chemical and Biological Weapons Programs,” International Crisis Group Asia Report No. 167, Jun. 18, 2009. A wide-ranging look at both types of weapons and their role in North Korean military thinking, to the extent we can know. (Crisis Group reports don’t list authors, but this one appeared when Daniel Pinkston was their guy in Seoul.)
• Mark Fitzpatrick, “North Korean Proliferation Challenges: The Role of the European Union,” EU Non-proliferation Consortium, Non-proliferation Report No. 12, June 2012. Don’t be misled by the subtitle; this 16-page brief is of interest to more than EU readers. It distills the main points of a much larger publication on North Korea produced by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in 2011 (not available online). Unfortunately, the nuclear and missile sections are now completely out of date, but read it for the chem and bio portions.
• Melissa Hanham, “Kim Jong Un Tours Pesticide Facility Capable of Producing Biological Weapons: A 38 North Special Report,” 38North.org, Jul. 9, 2015. Quite simply the best example of using open-source analysis to assess an aspect of North Korean WMD capabilities that has yet been published, blending technical understanding with a keen sense of how the North Korean regime uses ambiguous signals for deterrence or coercion.

North Korean political economy

• Kim Kwang Jin, “The Defector’s Tale: Inside North Korea’s Secret Economy,” World Affairs Journal, September-October 2011. (Alternative link if the above doesn’t work.) A penetrating explanation of North Korea’s parallel economies during the Kim Jong Il era (1994-2011): the anemic People’s Economy, and the flush Royal Court Economy, which supports both the ruler’s personal needs and North Korea’s WMD programs.
• Choe Sang-hun, “As Economy Grows, North Korea’s Grip on Society is Tested,” New York Times, Apr. 30, 2017. An eye-opening look at how much has changed in the North Korean economy since Kim Jong Un assumed power in December 2011.
• Atsuhito Isozaki (with James Person), “Understanding the North Korean Regime,” Wilson Center Asia Program, April 2017. A concise volume that explains North Korean regime ideology, structure, and perceptions through the lens of official propaganda, a rich and deeply revealing set of sources when studied closely. The author, a Japanese scholar, is familiar with a much wider range of scholarship than his American counterparts, having studied Japanese, South Korean, Chinese, and American works. One caveat: in its discussion of North Korean ideology, this monograph dwells on the legacy ideologies of juche sasang (the “self-determination” idea) and songun chongchi (military-first politics), neglecting the emergence of what now appears to be Kim Jong Un’s own signature ideology, jaryok jagang (“self-reliance and self-development”). It’s mentioned briefly in the previous item in the guise of “jagang, or self-empowerment,” but has yet to receive sustained attention in English-language studies of North Korea.

A bonus item

• Max Fisher and Jugal K. Patel, “What One Photo Tells Us About North Korea’s Nuclear Program,” New York Times, Feb. 24, 2017. I didn’t know where exactly to place this one in the categories above, but wasn’t about to leave it out. It’s a case study in several methods of open-source analysis, and something I was very pleased to be associated with. This feature shows just how stimulating the study of North Korean WMD can be!