Global Security Newswire July 5, 2006
North Korean Missile Threat Overstated, Critic Says
By David Ruppe
WASHINGTON — The U.S. news media and officials in Washington have significantly overstated the capabilities of both North Korea’s ballistic missiles and U.S. national missile defenses, a prominent defense analyst wrote in an analysis released Wednesday (see GSN, July 5).
Neither has been demonstrated through testing, but nevertheless they have been portrayed as proven operational systems, according to Center for Strategic and International Studies analyst Anthony Cordesman, responding to coverage and commentary of a failed flight of a multistage North Korean missile this week.
“If we fired today’s [U.S. missile defense] test bed systems, they might well malfunction just as badly as the North Korean test did. The future may well be very different, but the incapable shooting at the incapable is not a particularly good way to celebrate the Fourth of July,” he wrote in an analysis.
Worst-case assessments of a North Korean long-range missile capability have been based on “wild-assed guesses” about capability, he wrote. The North Korean missile — which has been portrayed in the press as an ICBM capable of reaching the United States and used to justify a multibillion long-range U.S. missile defense deployment — has not shown it can work and is not even clearly an ICBM, according to Cordesman.
“In the real world, it is only possible to talk about missile performance once a system is actually deployed and tested, its warhead is known, and enough firings have taken place to confirm actual operational capability,” he wrote.
“It is far from clear that North Korea is any closer to a real-world capability to attack the U.S. than it was before this series of tests, or that the large missile it tested was ever intended to be any form of ICBM,” he wrote.
Taking aim at the media, he wrote, “Rushing out to print maps with worst-case maximum ranges — rather than showing the uncertainty involved — is irresponsible journalism. This is particularly true when some analyst outside the intelligence community rounds up to a scare figure, and it is suddenly taken as fact. Reality is littered with the wrong guesses of retired
“experts,” intelligence officers, and military officers who grabbed 15 seconds of fame without a single hard fact,” Cordesman said.
Cordesman charged the administration with posturing for “talking about activating an unproven ballistic missile defense, whose booster seems to have serious reliability problems, to deal with a test it probably was almost certain would never hit the United States.”
The U.S. Northern Command in a July 5 release said the elements were “operational” during the test. Command spokesman Mike Kucharek told Global Security Newswire today, “We would have to be prepared for any eventuality. Obviously we’re getting classified intelligence on the things. I don’t think anybody knows what the capability of that missile is.”
Criticizes Media ‘Across the Board’
Cordesman is also a national security analyst for ABC News and, among many other roles, served as an intelligence assessment director in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In an interview yesterday, he would not comment specifically on the coverage by his own network, or any other specific news source, saying, “that’s not productive.”
During an ABC News World News Tonight broadcast following the tests, reporter Martha Raddatz said, “The only relief is that the test failed. … With a range of more than 6,000 miles, it is a missile capable of reaching the United States.”
“You’ve had pretty much everybody saying that sort of thing. I didn’t see any exceptions frankly and I still haven’t,” Cordesman said.
Quoted next in the newscast, Cordesman downplayed the implications of the test: “To have it blow up shortly after it took off — and while it was still the first stage — is much more an indication of North Korea’s incompetence than it is that North Korea is a threat.”
In his written analysis, he criticized various expert assessments that the North Korean missile’s maximum range was as high as 5,000 kilometers. “All are sheer guesswork, and all ignore the fact that missiles do not have maximum ranges; they have range-payloads,” he said. “If you do not know (or at least state your assumption about) the weight of the warhead or payload, your guesses are undefined and irresponsible rubbish.”
Globalsecurity.org Director John Pike, who has been widely interviewed on television assessing a substantial North Korean ICBM capability, said some experts, including Cordesman, appear to be making overly conservative estimates of North Korea’s capabilities.
Pike and his organization have assessed that the longest-range missile North Korea fired Monday was “modestly” larger and more powerful than previous intelligence assessments of the country’s multistage Taepodong rocket. He said his estimate is not achieved by analyzing any photos of the missile, which apparently are not publicly available, but rather by estimating from satellite imagery the size of the gantry apparently intended to hold the missile before launch. “The missile that he’s [Cordesman] talking about is not the missile tested July 4,” he said.
“Some may call it ‘wild-assed-guesses,’ we call it assessment,” he said.
Experts have also underestimated North Korea’s ability to build a light-weight nuclear warhead that could allow a missile to achieve a greater range, he said. “It’s just not that hard to build a small hydrogen bomb, if you’ve got modern desktop computers. Then we’re able to get the thing [Pike’s estimate of the North Korean missile’s range] out to 10,000 kilometers without being embarrassed,” he said.
“All that is required is the ingredients [for building a bomb], which these boys have, the idea which is public knowledge, and computing power that Michael Dell will sell you for less than $1,000,” he said. “I think they’ve got light-weight H-bombs.”
Pike allowed, though, that North Korea might have constructed a larger gantry to deceive the United States into thinking it was developing an ICBM. “Yes, of course,” he said, adding that North Korea has been suspected of displaying mock-ups of fictitious missiles in the past for U.S. satellites
“I would be willing to assert that this whole Taepodong 2 thing is part of an elaborate North Korean strategic deception effort,” he said, suggesting Pyongyang could more effectively launch a shorter-range missile at the United States from an inconspicuous offshore cargo ship.
He added, though, that just because there is no available evidence of a system does not mean it does not exist.
Missile Defense Rationale Challenged
Cordesman challenged one the major rationales the Bush administration has cited for deploying Ground-based Midcourse Defense system in Alaska and California — that North Korea could soon field an ICBM capable of striking the United States with weapons of mass destruction.
“The data available … strongly indicate that North Korea is still focusing on getting missiles that can attack targets anywhere North Korea needs to hit in Asia (with the possible exception of Guam) and not the U.S. The limited technical data available on the Nodong [missile] series to date do not indicate that it can hit any meaningful target in the U.S. with a nuclear weapon or any other meaningful payload,” he wrote.
Boosters for the missile North Korea has displayed in the past seemed unlikely suited for use on an ICBM, he wrote. “It would probably take a larger diameter booster than North Korea ever displayed before July 4 to play such a role.”
At most, available data suggests that North Korea is “beginning early testing” of a missile only capable of throwing the equivalent of a rock at Alaska, Cordesman wrote.
While North Korea might secretly be working on a potentially more powerful missile, he wrote, there is “no reason to overreact or panic, particularly since applying worst case wild-assed-guesses to two conspicuous design failures is not simply ridiculous, it is childish.”
© Copyright 2006, National Journal Group, Inc
