Report: How North Korea Managed to Rapidly Advance Their Missile Program

Our nations have been friendly since their successful independence bid from Russia and it’s apparent that they do very much appreciate us on a personal level.  Ukraine has had its ups and downs, but through it all, they have maintained very close ties to the United States, especially when Russia a few years ago had decided to come stomping through their territory like a grizzly through a field of daisies.

After Ukraine lost many of its contracts with Russia for missile construction, Yuzhmash engine company began training other nations’ interns and North Korea was one such nation.  In 2014, an incursion by two North Korean spies into the technology of the missile engines was exposed and the two were expelled from the country.  But during a particularly volatile time when Russia was invading Ukraine territory to take back areas it announced was their rightful property, North Korea took advantage of this turmoil and sent other spies for the missile technology.

It now appears likely that they succeeded.

When the US State Department supported Ukraine domestic forces and nationalist elements to stage a successful and deadly coup against then pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, the outcome was supposed to be a nation that is a undisputed US ally and persistent threat, distraction and non-NATO opponent to bordering Russia. Instead, it now appears that it has been Ukraine which was, as the NYT writes, the secret behind the success of North Korea’s allegedly nuclear-capable ballistic missile program.
Specifically, in a blockbuster report this morning, the NYT alleges that North Korea has been making black-market purchases of powerful rocket engines from a Ukrainian factory citing “expert analysis being published Monday and classified assessments by American intelligence agencies.”

The studies may solve the mystery of how North Korea began succeeding so suddenly after a string of fiery missile failures, some of which may have been caused by American sabotage of its supply chains and cyberattacks on its launches. After those failures, the North changed designs and suppliers in the past two years, according to a new study by Michael Elleman, a missile expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

According to the report, analysts who studied photographs of Kim Jong-un, inspecting the new rocket motors concluded that they derive from designs that once powered the Soviet Union’s missile fleet. “The engines were so powerful that a single missile could hurl 10 thermonuclear warheads between continents.”

Since the alleged engines have been linked to only a few former Soviet sites, government investigators and experts have focused their inquiries on a missile factory in Dnipro, Ukraine, on the edge of the territory where Russia is fighting a low-level war to break off part of Ukraine. During the Cold War, the factory made the deadliest missiles in the Soviet arsenal, including the giant SS-18. It remained one of Russia’s primary producers of missiles even after Ukraine gained independence.

While it’s pretty clear now that North Korea has been benefitting from the technology of the Ukranian-based missile factory, there are now rumors that, perhaps through arrangements with the North Koreans, the Ukranian company has, in fact, been supplying the rogue nation with missiles wince 2014!

The obvious implication here is that – if accurate – Ukraine had been working with North Korea for years, well into the administration of Barack Obama, the same president under whom the Ukraine coup was greenlight, which would also suggest that the current North Korean crisis is explicitly a consequence of Obama’s foreign policies.

Which is why we read the following amusing disclaimer in the NYT: “How the Russian-designed engines, called the RD-250, got to North Korea is still a mystery.”

With so much going on right now between North Korea, Syria, and Iran, adding Ukraine and Russia into the mix continues to cook up a soup almost too spicy for consumption.  Unfortunately, there really is no way to throw the soup out the window and start fresh with a new pot.  Trump will just have to adjust and we can continue to hope that he can create one hell of a gumbo!

Update, the Ukranian government denies the report:

The Ukrainian government has denied supplying advanced missile engines to North Korea after a report said Pyongyang’s latest ICBMs use motors produced in a factory in former Soviet state.

Kiev said the suggestion that advanced rocket engine might have been sold to North Korea by corrupt staff or managers at the Yuzhmash missile factor in the city of Dnipro was ill-informed and probably Russian propaganda.

“This information is not based on any grounds, provocative by its content, and most likely provoked by Russian secret services to cover their own crimes,” said Oleksandr Turchynov, the chairman of Ukraine’s Security and Defence Council said.

“Ukraine has always adhered to all its international commitments, therefore, Ukrainian defense and aerospace complex did not supply weapons and military technology to North Korea,” the council said in a statement.

Source:  ZeroHedge, Telegraph