Source of N Korea’s potent missile fuel a mystery

WASHINGTON D.C. — When North Korea launched long-range missiles this summer, and again on Friday, demonstrating its ability to strike Guam and perhaps the United States mainland, it powered the weapons with a rare, potent rocket fuel that US intelligence agencies believe initially came from China and Russia.

The US government is scrambling to determine whether those two countries are still providing the ingredients for the highly volatile fuel and, if so, whether North Korea’s supply can be interrupted, either through sanctions or sabotage.

Among those who study the issue, there is a growing belief that the US should focus on the fuel, either to halt it, if possible, or to take advantage of its volatile properties to slow the North’s programme.

But it may well be too late. Intelligence officials believe that the North’s programme has advanced to the point where it is no longer as reliant on outside suppliers, and that it may itself be making the deadly fuel, known as UDMH. Despite a long record of intelligence warnings that the North was acquiring both forceful missile engines and the fuel to power them, there is no evidence that Washington has ever moved with urgency to cut off Pyongyang’s access to the rare propellant.

Classified memos from both the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations laid out, with what turned out to be prescient clarity, how the North’s pursuit of the highly potent fuel would enable it to develop missiles that could strike almost anywhere in the continental US.

In response to inquiries from The New York Times, Mr Timothy Barrett, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said that “based on North Korea’s demonstrated science and technological capabilities — coupled with the priority Pyongyang places on missile programmes — North Korea probably is capable of producing UDMH domestically”. UDMH is short for unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine.

Some experts are sceptical that the North has succeeded in domestic production, given the great difficulty of making and using the highly poisonous fuel, which in far more technically advanced nations, has led to giant explosions of missiles and factories.

In public, at least, the Trump administration has been far more focused on ordinary fuels — the oil and gas used to heat homes and power vehicles. The US has pushed to cut off those supplies to the North, but it settled last week for modest cutbacks under a United Nations resolution.

Nonetheless, on Sunday, President Trump made a case that those sanctions were having an effect. He wrote on Twitter that he had spoken with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and tossed out a new nickname for the North’s leader, Mr Kim Jong-un.

“Asked him how Rocket Man is doing,” Mr Trump wrote. “Long gas lines forming in North Korea. Too bad!”

But inside the intelligence agencies and among a few on Capitol Hill who have studied the matter, UDMH is a source of fascination and seen as a natural target for the US effort to halt Mr Kim’s missile programme.

“If North Korea does not have UDMH, it cannot threaten the United States, it’s as simple as that,” said Senator Edward Markey, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“These are the issues that the US intelligence community has to answer: From which countries they receive the fuel — it’s probably China — and whether North Korea has a stockpile and how big it is.”

Today, the chemical is made primarily by China, a few European nations and Russia, which calls it the devil’s venom. Russia only recently resumed production of the fuel, after Western supplies were cut off over its annexation of Crimea.

The White House and US intelligence agencies declined to answer questions about what, if anything, they were doing to cut off North Korea’s supplies, citing the highly classified nature of their effort to disrupt the North Korean missile programme. Those efforts have included cyber attacks authorised by President Obama in 2014.

But in interviews with four senior US officials who served as the North advanced its programme, none could recall any specific discussion of how to disrupt North Korea’s access to the one fuel that now powers its long-range missiles. All four said that while there were wide-ranging discussions about how to penalise the North, they could not remember any that focused specifically on the propellant.

Twice — in 2012 and 2014 — the fuel was included in UN Security Council lists of prohibited export items. Experts say few paid attention to that fine print.

“All sorts of things banned for export to North Korea find their way in,” said Mr Vann H Van Diepen, a former State Department official who was at the centre of many US efforts to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

But the public and involuntarily public record of US efforts to track North Korea’s progress shows a growing concern dating back a decade that the North was obtaining Russian-designed engines to power its missiles, and the fuel to pour into them. A memo designated “secret” and signed in October 2008 by Ms Condoleezza Rice, then the Secretary of State, warned allies that the North had obtained an engine powered by UDMH that “represents a substantial advance in North Korea’s liquid propellant technology”, adding that it “allows North Korea to build even longer-range missiles”.

The memo, which was included in documents later released by WikiLeaks, was evidence of early efforts to get countries that had signed the Missile Technology Control Regime to keep such technologies out of the hands of North Korea, Iran and other nations.

When Mrs Hillary Clinton succeeded Ms Rice in 2009, she issued a similar warning. “North Korea’s next goal may be to develop a mobile ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) that would be capable of threatening targets around the world,” she wrote to member states in the missile control group.

The question now is whether the North Koreans have developed their own capabilities to produce the fuel. Given the country’s determination — and success — in proving it could launch a nuclear attack on the US, experts believe it is just another hurdle to be surmounted.

Mr Eckhart W Schmidt, who has written a two-volume textbook on fuels like UDMH and toured fuel plants around the globe, said his own judgment was that North Korea could learn how to achieve industrial production “if the supply from China or Russia is cut off”.

Mr Van Diepen, the former State Department official, said that in the quarter-century that the North Koreans have worked on increasingly sophisticated missiles, they have gone through many stages of foreign assistance in obtaining the fuel, the precursors, the formula and the manufacturing gear. He said the North was likely to have achieved some ability to make the volatile fuel — even if that resulted in occasional tragedies.

“My guess,” Mr Van Diepen said, “is that the North Korean tolerance for casualties is probably pretty high.” THE NEW YORK TIMES