Hwasal Ground Launched Cruise Missile [GLCM] - KN-27 ???
A cruise missile is a guided missile used against surface targets, designed to deliver a warhead over long distances and with high accuracy. They often fly at low altitudes and are hard to detect which leaves the targeted State with little time to react. Several versions of cruise missiles exist with different capacities with regard to payload and range. They have been developed and produced by several countries and have also been acquired and deployed by a further number of States.
Cruise missiles are slower than ballistic missiles so they're in fact easier to intercept but the former also have features to evade defense systems such as flying at low altitudes or being launched in directions that are not easy to detect or predict. Also, sometimes their flying routes are designed to be more complicated so it's incorrect to automatically assume they're easy to intercept.
The fact that the word "strategic" was used by the KCNA to describe the missiles indicating that there's a possibility they're being developed to be able to equip nuclear warheads. Nuclear armed cruise missiles carry with them some very specific risk implications. Cruise missiles can be launched without warning and come in both nuclear and conventional versions. The latter version is more common and has on several occasions over the last decades been used by States, including nuclear-weapon States, against military targets in other States or against non-state actors such as terrorist groups located on the territory of other States.
In any armed conflict involving a State that has cruise missiles in its armory, it is likely that these weapons will be deployed when the military target is deemed sufficiently important or well defended to justify the use of cruise missiles in an attack. This also applies to a state with access to both conventionally and nuclear armed cruise missiles. If the attacking state is a nuclear armed State with access to nuclear armed cruise missiles, then the risk of mistaking the conventional missile for a nuclear one is evident.
The development of a number of different technologies at about the same time made a small, very accurate, lowflying, long-range missile possible. Decreases in the size and weight of both guidance and engines, along with markedly enhanced capabilities, were key developments . Finally, the miniaturization of nuclear warheads made the cruise missile a very potent war machine.
In actuality, the cruise missile, as an operational concept and system, has been around for some time; and very early on inspired rather far-reaching claims. A newspaper account in 1915 called it: "A device . . . likely to revolutionize modern warfare." Before World War I was over, the cruise missile, or the aerial torpedo, as it was then called, was touted as "the gun of the future" and compared in importance with the invention of gunpowder. Billy Mitchell saw it as : "A weapon of tremendous value and terrific force to airpower."
The passing of years has not dimmed enthusiasm for the device, a newspaperman in 1977 writing that : "Except for gunpowder and atomic bomb, no weapon has threatened a greater effect on war and peace than the cruise missile." More temperate comments also emphasize its importance. "The advent of the long-range highly accurate cruise missiles," one high official told Congress, "is perhaps the most significant weapon development of the decade." According to Leslie Gelb, the noted defense analyst : "The cruise missile could be an invaluable addition to our security or a dangerous complication."
Advancing technology transformed the large, unreliable, inaccurate cruise missile of the 1950s and 1960s into the much different cruise missile of the 1970s and 1980s. Improvements in engines, fuels, materials, and guidance account for this change. With the possible exception of guidance, all were evolutionary developments; that is, the technology grew slowly and in predictable steps.
Of all the technologies associated with the cruise missile, the most crucial is, and has always been, guidance. As has been amply demonstrated, one of the constant problems throughout the cruise missile program has been its inaccurate and unreliable, large and heavy guidance systems. But significant incremental improvements in inertial systems and computers, and the development of terrain contour matching (TERCOM), yielded radically new capabilities.
In 1958, inertial systems had an inherent inaccuracy (drift) of about .03 degrees per hour. By 1970, this had been cut to about .005 degrees or one-third nm per hour. Concurrently, the size, weight, and power requirements of inertial systems shrank, decreasing weight from about 300 pounds in 1960 to 29 pounds a decade later. The total cruise missile guidance package, including computer, radar altimeter, and inertial systems, now measures one and one-third cubic feet and weighs 115 pounds. Therefore by 1970, a smaller inertial guidance system had achieved much better accuracy, on the order of one-third nm per hour (about one nm for a 550-knot vehicle traveling 1,650 nm).
Advances in guidance technology were the most important developments in the evolution of the cruise missile. New manufacturing processes and materials did reduce weights and costs, but neither was a major factor in the overall success of the missile. There was another major technological development, however: the evolution of a small fuel-efficient turbofan jet engine.
Air enters and is compressed in both the turbojet and turbofan engine. But while all air passes through the combustion process in the former, part is diverted and bypasses combustion in the latter. A turbojet is simpler, less expensive (1/3 to 1/4), and has a relatively smaller diameter (therefore, less frontal area and drag) than a turbofan The turbofan, however, is more efficient (15 to 20 percent less fuel consumption at subsonic speed), and leaves a smaller acoustical and infrared signature than does the turbojet.
The capabilities of the North Korean jet engine industry were suggested by a July 2013 incident in which Panamanian investigators discovered engines for MiG-21 fighter jets aboard a North Korean ship coming from Cuba. Authorities in Cuba originally said the ship was carrying a donation of sugar for North Korea but once weapons were found Havana admitted there were "obsolete" arms on the vessel being sent to North Korea for repairs. "In these last containers we have found what seem to be jet engines for MiG-21s," Panamanian drug prosecutor Javier Caraballo said on July 31 of what investigators found aboard the North Korean ship "Chong Chon Gang." "We are talking about 12 jet engines in the containers we have opened so far, as well as a vehicle that seems to be some type of control center, used to direct batteries of radars and missiles."
A mobile transporter erector launcher (TEL) carries one or more missiles. In the field, the units are capable of self-contained operations for a period of time. The ground-launched cruise missile [GLCM] possessed many military advantages. The mobile GLCM is much better able to survive pre-launch attack than either aircraft on the ground or stationary missiles.
The primary intepretation key betweeen the earlier Hwasal 1 and the subsequent Hwasal 2 is the visibly smaller air inlet on the later missile. A variety of other minor differences are also visible to the rear at the interface between the booster and the cruise missile itself. Although probably influeced by the US BGM-109 Tomahawk, the Russian Kh-55 Granat / SSC-4 Slingshot, and the Chinese DH-10 / CH-10 / CJ-10, there are evident differences between the Korean missiles and their predecessors.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
