Kim’s next submarine may make N-talks even harder

Bloomberg

Kim Jong-un has spent much of his time as North Korea’s leader developing bigger and more advanced nuclear weapons. This year, he may try to make them harder to find by putting them under the sea.
Recent North Korean reports touting a new submarine and its test of a ballistic missile designed to be launched from one have fuelled speculation that a sub may be the “new strategic weapon” Kim promised to unveil this year. While such a vessel would probably be noisy and unable to stray far from the coast without being tracked, it may be enough to serve Kim’s needs.
Even one submarine lurking off the Korean Peninsula, beyond the gaze of spy satellites, would give US military planners a dangerous new threat to consider in the event of any conflict. And for Kim, anything that makes it harder for the US to imagine an actual war, brings him closer to a goal that alluded his father: international recognition as a nuclear state.
“In terms of war planning, the US, South Korea, and Japan need to take the undersea nuclear threat seriously and plan for anti-submarine warfare contingencies,” said Ankit Panda, an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists and author of the upcoming book “Kim Jong Un and the Bomb: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea.”
Kim has kept the world guessing since pledging in a December 31 speech to build a more powerful nuclear deterrent. Although a “strategic weapon” could include everything from advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles to multiple warhead payloads and more powerful atomic bombs, the secretive regime has publicly said it was making “big efforts” to expand its missile-carrying submarine fleet.
Launching a nuclear-weapons capable sub would provide the clearest illustration yet of Kim’s efforts to bolster his arsenal despite President Donald Trump’s June 2018 assertion that North Korea “no longer” posed a nuclear threat. Even before agreeing with Trump to “work towards complete denuclearisation,” Kim had demonstrated his ability to build hydrogen bombs and missiles capable of carrying them to any city in the US.
A flurry of shorter-range missile tests last year showed the regime has since made progress toward developing solid-fuel rockets that are easier to hide, faster to deploy and harder to intercept. Among those was a submarine-launched ballistic missile that flew almost 1,000 kilometres into space on October 3, giving it an estimated horizontal range of about 1,900 kilometres.
That could put all of South Korea and Japan — together home to about 170 million people including some 80,000 US troops — in range of a submarine hidden off North Korea’s eastern coast. There, a vessel could hide among others from the country’s fleet of 60 to 80 smaller submarines, leaving the allies unsure which, if any, are nuclear armed.
Vice Admiral Jon Hill, the head of the US’s Missile Defense Agency, expressed confidence in the allies’ ability to counter a nuclear-armed submarine after the latest SLBM test. “We need to keep an eye on it and continue to assess that to make sure the architecture’s in place to deal with it,” Hill told a Center for Strategic & International Studies gathering in October.
North Korea has already teased the construction of a submarine that may be able to carry the new missile, publishing photos of Kim inspecting a large vessel under construction.