Subscribe
E-Paper
 |
| U.S. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released the report "Undeclared North Korea: The Sangam-ni Missile Operating Base" on Feb. 15 (local time). Screenshot from CSIS Benyond Parallel website |
By Jung Da-min
North Korea has about 20 missile operating bases that would not appear to be on the agenda for denuclearization negotiations with the U.S. at the second summit next week, a prominent U.S. think tank said in its latest report on North Korea's missile bases.
The report, titled "Undeclared North Korea: The Sangnam-ni Missile Operating Base," released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on Feb. 15 (local time), reveals its new findings on the Sangnam-ni missile base located within North Korea's strategic missile belt in Hochon County, South Hamgyong Province.
"As of 2018, the base is active and being well-maintained by North Korean standards," the report says. It presents the March 1999 establishment and subsequent development process of the missile base 250 kilometers north of the demilitarized zone.
According to the report, Sangnam-ni is an operational missile base housing a battalion or regiment-sized unit equipped with Hwasong-10 (Musudan) intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) with a range of more than 3,000 kilometers.
"The deployment of the Hwasong-10, with 3,000+ kilometer ranges, at Sangnam-ni is a component of North Korea's presumed offensive ballistic missile strategy that provides a strategic-level first strike capability against targets located throughout East Asia as far as U.S. forces in Okinawa and Guam," it says. "The base is defended by a single anti-aircraft artillery position and nearby surface-to-air missile bases."
But there is a possibility that the North's Korean People's Army (KPA) Strategic Force may replace Hawsong-10 with Hawsong-12 IRBM (KN-17) or Pukkuksong-2 (KN-15) medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) as the Hwasong-10 suffered repeated failures in a number of training launches in 2016, the report adds.
The development and operation of the base is part of North Korea's plans to build a series of strategic ballistic missile operating bases in the northern regions of the country for longer-range systems under development, it says.
Previously, the CSIS released two reports revealing findings on the Sakkanmol and Sino-ri missile operating bases last November and January, respectively, as parts of a series of reports on North Korea's "undeclared" missile bases.
The reports say there are about 20 bases and the think tank's Beyond Parallel project has located 13 of them.
The reports are based on the ongoing study of KPA ballistic missile infrastructure begun in 1985 by Joseph Bermudez, one of the report authors and a senior fellow for Imagery Analysis at the CSIS. Victor Cha, a senior adviser and the inaugural holder of the Korea Chair at CSIS, and Lisa Collins, a fellow with the Korea Chair at CSIS, co-authored the reports.
Their first report on the Sakkanmol missile base earlier stirred controversy on whether North Korea has a duty to "declare" its missile bases. The latest report on this matter said 10 standing United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions, including the most recent UNSCR 2397, "explicitly" ban North Korea from developing and testing ballistic missiles.
It also called for the need to include this subject in negotiations between the U.S. and North Korea, warning that only discussing the dismantlement of the Tongchang-ri missile test site ― first promised by the North last June ― would not help stop North Korea's military threat.
"Any potential agreement that decommissioning the Tongchang-ri (Sohae) rocket test stand alone would obscure the extant military threat to U.S. forces and South Korea from this and other undeclared ballistic missile bases in this CSIS study," it says.
