North Korea is just getting started on a fleet of more powerful nukes
North Korean state media released images of Kim Jong Un visiting a plant that makes rocket engines for the country's ballistic missile program, and they reveal capabilities and intentions that paint a nightmare scenario for the US.
"Today is a very bad day," George Herbert, an Aerospace consultant and rocket engineering scientist who works with the US's primere North Korean missile analysts wrote in response to the pictures.
To the untrained eye, the pictures of Kim touring the missile plant look like nothing special. Kim beams a broad smile next to a diagram. Kim walks past a big spool of wire-looking things. Kim runs his hand over a big weird block of... something.
But as is often the case in North Korean propaganda images, each shot reveals an important message about the state of the country's notoriously opaque missile development. In the case of this recent batch of photos, North Korea sought to prove the US wrong on all its most wishful thinking.
With its photo gallery on Wednesday, North Korea demonstrated that it's hot on the trail of technologies that can match the US's ability to throw huge nuclear payloads across massive distances.
In the slides below find out what experts are saying about North Korea's new imagery.
North Korea's new missiles will be advanced and lightweight, and Kim wants you to know that.
Rodong Sinmun
Herbert told Business Insider that North Korea appears to have made leaps and bounds in its application of composite materials to its missile program.
Instead of heavy sheets of aluminum, North Korea now looks ready to use kevlar and carbon fibre materials to drastically reduce the weight of the missiles, and thereby the range or payload.
"The significance [of the advanced materials] is that those casings weigh about half as much. Either you can carry a bigger payload or you can go further," said Herbert.
North Korea appears on the verge of making solid-fueled missiles, which would be a major breakthrough and a nightmare for the US to stop.
Thomson Reuters
But the design of the motor also indicates that it will use solid fuel, which would be a nightmare for the US. Liquid-fueled rockets require huge teams to fuel the missile and prepare it for launch.
The process on large missiles can take a half hour and requires a long convoy of trucks. This makes the process easy to spot and potentially disrupt for the US military. Solid fueled rockets based on trucks can just park and fire in minutes. The US has no chance of stopping such a launch from a remote place in North Korea.
"The most advanced solid rocket motors use advanced carbon fibre and kevlar," said Herbert, indicating that North Korean missiles could soon approach the effectiveness of advanced US or Russian missiles.
Also, solid fueled missiles could turn some of North Korea's 60 submarines into nuclear threats.
KCNA/Reuters
Herbert identified the solid fueled, kevlar-wrapped missile that North Korea showed off as the Pukgukgsong-3, or the third version of North Korea's submarine-launched missiles.
A nuclear-armed North Korea is scary, but if North Korea could arm even a few of its 60 or so submarines with nuclear missiles, even with the US's massive advantage in submarines and submarine hunting, it would present a likely unsolvable puzzle for the US military.
Additionally, missiles launched from submarines don't need to have ICBM ranges, as they can get close to a target. Regardless, Herbert said the new materials would probably boost the range of the missiles by 30 or 40 percent.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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