How did North Korea get its missiles?

North Korea has proven adept at selling missiles around the world — to Iran, Syria and Pakistan, among others. Most of them are modified Soviet-era Scud missiles, but for many years, there’s been speculation about the North Korean modifications. How did a country so poor manage to reverse-engineer and manufacture a complex missile?

Now, Robert H. Schmucker and Markus Schiller of Germany have come up with an answer: the North Koreans didn’t do it on their own. In a draft paper just posted at the missile proliferation blog Capabilities times Intentions, the two experts argue that North Korea managed to procure the technology from the former Soviet Union and Russia.

They don’t offer proof, but their paper is likely to raise questions once again about how much know-how and how many rocket scientists leaked to Pyonyang as the Soviet Union imploded. In The Dead Hand, I described how the Russian authorities stopped a group of designers:

In one extraordinary case, North Korea attempted to recruit an entire missile design bureau: in 1993, the specialists at the V. P. Makeyev Design Bureau in the city of Miass, near Chelyabinsk, were invited to travel to Pyongyang. The bureau designed submarine launched missiles, but military orders had dried up. Through a middleman, North Korea recruited the designers, who were told they would be building rockets to send civilian satellites into space. One of them, Yuri Bessarabov, told the newspaper Moscow News that he earned less than workers at a local dairy, while the Koreans were offering $1,200 a month. About twenty of the designers and their families were preparing to fly out of Moscow’s international airport in December when they were stopped by the Russian authorities and sent home. “That was the first case when we noticed the North Korean attempts to steal missile technology,” a retired federal security agent said years later in an interview. If you look at a missile, the security agent said, the North Koreans recruited a specialist to help them with every section, from nose cone to engine.

In their draft paper, Schmucker and Shiller speculate that other Russian experts and some leftover Soviet-era missiles may have nonetheless made it to North Korea. “All of the North Korean missiles were procured from Russia or at least realized with foreign support,” they write. They don’t point fingers at the Russian government, but “a connection to Russian institutions.”

“Much happens in dark alleys,” they note, recalling how Saddam Hussein’s representitive bought missile guidance gyroscopes from a Russian military institute.

Schmucker is one of the world’s leading specialists on missile technology, and the paper argues that it was impossible for North Korea to make great progress by reverse engineering a few Soviet and Russian designs. “Reverse engineering is so difficult that there is not one single proven example for successfully reverse-engineered missiles and rockets,” he writes. And it might be especially difficult in a country so impoverished and troubled as North Korea.

Schmucker is not the first to suspect that North Korea drew on the Soviet and Russian rocket technology. Others have also speculated about it in the past. In the case of Iran, some of the Russian engineers talked openly about going to Tehran. So far, there is no solid evidence of a similar underground railroad of engineers showing up in Pyongyang. But Schmucker and Shiller say this is the only possibile explanation for North Korea’s missile arsenal. The weapons and technology were procured by North Korea, which then successfully sold them on to others.

Proliferation in, proliferation out.

Update, June 10: See some criticism of the Schmucker and Shiller report in comments here and some back and forth with them here.