Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 8 – In two articles published online this week, Russian analyst Aleksandr Nemets details the evidence many have assembled
showing that Moscow is heavily involved in both the rocket program of North
Korea and Pyongyang’s “aggressive plans” to use it against other countries.
It is absolutely essential, he says,
that South Korea, Japan and the United States understand that everything that
is now brewing in the region is what Moscow or more precisely Putin wants” and
not some rogue action by Kim Jong Un as many imagine (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=59AD9D48C5F93 and kasparov.ru/material.php?id=59B19008494AB).
In
the first of these articles, Nemets traces the history of Russian deliveries of
missiles to North Korea in recent decades and the ways in which, apparently
with some Russian assistance, Pyongyang has modified them, and then offers
three main conclusions:
First
of all, he says, “the development of the relatively primitive ballistic rocket
Khvasun-10, one that corresponds to the level of Soviet rockets of the 1960s,
from the beginning in 1992 until the series of tests in 2016, lasted 24 years.”
What the North Koreans came up with was “a copy of the Soviet R-27 rocket.”
In
some ways, it was not even as good, but it is important to note that the
Khvasun-10 does not contain anything original,” a pattern that speaks to ‘the
low scientific-technical potential of North Korea,” Nemets argues.
Second,
he continues, “even this primitive result would have been impossible without
very intensive Russian assistance, especially in 2015-2016. Why did Moscow feel
compelled to provide this? Obviously not for money … Beyond any doubt, Moscow’s
goal was the infliction of maximum harm on America.”
And
third, “the Khvasun-12 ballistic rocket, which was successfully tested in May
2017 and which has a range of more than 4000 kilometers and is capable of
striking Guam and Alaska, is a much-improved version of the Khvasun-10,
although it is based fundamentally on the very same technologies.”
Taken
together, Nemets says, all this shows that “it is absolutely excluded that the
weak industrial and scientific-technical system of North Korea could have
created the Khvasun-12 in any case so quickly. If the Russian share in the
Khvasun-10 was conditionally more than 80 percent, then in the case of the
Khvasun-12, it approached 100 percent.”
In
the second article, the Russian analyst broadens his focus in order to suggest
that the timing of North Korea’s actions, its missile launches and threats in
particular, reflects less a Pyongyang calendar than a Moscow one intended by
Putin to do maximum harm to the United States.
Nemets
argues that the North Korean actions happened precisely as Russian-American
relations were deteriorating, when Moscow’s expectations for a new deal with
Donald Trump were replaced by a recognition that Washington was going to take a
hard line against Russia for its interference in American elections and its
aggression in Ukraine.
Ukrainian
officials have pointed to these links, but their words have been dismissed by
many who believe that Kyiv is simply trying to blacken Russia’s reputation (and
respond to Moscow’s claims that North Korea’s missiles came from Ukrainian
factories) in order to win more support from the West, the Moscow analyst
suggests.
But
now a Russian official has implicitly made the connection between Moscow’s
intentions and Pyongyang’s actions, Nemets says. Sergey Ryabkov, Russia’s
representative to the United Nations, said that “the government of the Russian
federation had been fored to react to the additional dislocation of (powerful)
American THAAD complexes in South Korea and Japan that are capable of
intercepting ballistic rockets.”
Put
in more normal language, the Russian analyst concludes, this shows that “Moscow,
infuriated by the fact that [North Korea’s] neighbors don’t approve [Pyongyang’s]
nuclear and thermonuclear tests and the launch of rockets flying over the territory
of Japan, was simply forced to do something.”
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