Defense Analyst Delivers His Take on North Korean Missile Program to Tokyo Press
David Cortez
November 14, 2017
On the afternoon of November 9th, president of Nexial Research Inc. and long time defense analyst, Lance Gatling, spoke at the Foreign Correspondence Club of Japan about the state of the North Korean missile program to members of the Tokyo press. While the actions of the North Koreans are of global concern, Gatling repeatedly reminded listeners that Japan has the unfortunate circumstance of being in close proximity to the provocative regime, making what he had to say all the more relevant.
Along with a detailed break down of the current North Korean arsenal and what the regime is capable of, Gatling also dispelled many misconceptions about what measures are realistically available to counter any aggression. “Many of the popular terms used to describe shooting down missiles or things like are just completely incorrect”, confessed Gatling, after which a palpable air of disappointment could be sensed in the audience. Gatling made it very clear that missiles are not like planes, and the physics of a missile that “comes screaming over the horizon” acts much more like a giant bullet than a fuselage that is supported by lift.
This is not to say that shooting a missile out of the sky is impossible, it is just incredibly challenging. “If you don’t know where it’s going you’re definitely not going to shoot it down,” said Gatling, “you have to plan well ahead, you have to know exactly where it’s going in order to engage a missile like this. There is no guess work, there is no second chance.”
Gatling then threw up a map of various locations where the United States could conceivably launch an intercepting missile high into the atmosphere, if given enough warning. “The Unites States has strategic depth,” mentioned Gatling, which is just a fancy way of saying it is far enough away from North Korea to have ample warning. “Japan has a very different problem. It has no strategic depth what so ever. It has to make decisions very early,” said Gatling. So while residents of Seattle or Los Angeles might be able to take comfort in their strategic depth, residents of Tokyo don’t have the same luxury.
So what can Japan reasonably expect regarding self defense in the event of a malicious missile launch from North Korea? First and foremost, according to Gatling, “no one knows how accurate these [missiles] are, including the North Koreans,” and this should give the Japanese some solace about the North Korean ability to accurately target city centers. “The safest place you can be is where they are actually aiming because they don’t really know where it’s going,” joked Gatling.
The second reason for the Japanese to feel a bit more at ease is the sheer amount of missile interception technology that blankets region. The South Koreans have Patriot missiles, the Unites States have deployed THAADs (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) — which can reach in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, and the Japanese Ministry of Defense has their own Patriot missiles as a last ditch effort.
“So the question is,” said Gatling, “what do the Koreans really have?” Most of the North Korean arsenal is made up of antique kerosene fuelled Soviet era missiles with no real terror quotient because, according to Gatling, “they take weeks to prep for launch and therefore are easily sabotaged.” The classic mobile missiles often seen paraded around Pyongyang are only useful tactically and can barely reach Tokyo. These missiles, known as Nodong-1, sit on launchers whose wheeled mobility and launch-anywhere capability is not too much of a problem in a county with only 782km of paved road — as apposed to the city of Tokyo which has over 28,000km of road — which makes these launchers, according to Gatling, difficult to hide.
That being said, the two missiles that have really changed the game are the Pukguksong 2 and the KN class rocket. These missiles have solid fuels that can be stored inside the missile for years, which allows the missile to be fired at any time without warning. Gatling noted, “This is a whole new level of readiness and can be fired with almost no preparation at all.” The KN rockets, when launched at the appropriate 45° angle, have a range that can potentially hit targets as far away as Washington D.C., and obviously, “that’s when the Unites States gets interested.”
Tempering fears about such a launch however, is the difficulty of the successful reentry of the warhead tipped cone after it has separated from the missiles fuel cylinder and now must attempt to come back down to the earth from the upper atmosphere. According to Gatling, this is the most difficult portion in the launch cycle of an ICBM. It requires heat shielding and guidance systems that, at the moment, the North Koreans do not have –which is why Gatling feels confident enough to make jokes about their missile accuracy.
Because of the difficulty of reentry, the real fear is of an upper atmosphere explosion over Japan or the Unites States, which would result in an electro-magnetic pulse shock wave that would destroy either nations technological function entirely. For Gatling, this is the real fear. “You think about waking in the morning and none of your electronics work…none. Zero. Cell phones, towers, your car doesn’t start…we all starve within a week or so.” It is far easier to just fling a nuke into space and detonate in order to create an EMP chain reaction than to actually deliver a thermo-nuclear warhead to a specific ground target 10,000km away from the launch site.
“For someone to try this against the United States or Japan would be a tremendously scary prospect. Politically it’s a huge step because you’re trying to take down a whole society.” This is the sort of thing that has the Pentagon and Japanese Ministry of Defense really taking notice, which, could have been a political miscalculation for the North Koreans. “They may over played their hand with this,” said Gatling, who believes that the North Korean lack of guidance systems for reentry tips off the U.S. that an EMP is the regimes most likely aggressive maneuver.