The Ports of North Korea

Yesterday, we started to get some ballpark numbers relevant to interdicting WMD shipments. Today, we are going to continue to try to get a feel for the problem of determining whether or not there is proscribed material onboard a ship. The first step, I think, is to considering the volume of shipping going into and out of North Korean ports. The larger the volume of shipping, the harder it will be to notice unusual activities. On the other hand, if there are few ocean-going ships, it will be much easier to keep an eye on what is happening. Tomorrow, we will (finally) get down to the question of actually observing the loading of ships. To jump ahead a little, it is going to prove very difficult to spot WMD related containers and the “reasonable grounds” could very well come from knowing where the ship is going. That will be the final entry in this series.

We (i.e. I) only have a snapshot of that shipping as presented by GoogleEarth though it does manage to convey an amazingly vivid sense of the North’s economy. ( If you need further confirmation of it, check out this image of the Korean peninsula taken at night. )

The GoogleEarth image above shows all the port facilities (and then some) found by North Korea Economy Watch . I have only seen evidence of large, ocean going cargo vessels at a couple of these: Rajin and Yuktae-dong (which NKEW labels Ship Construction/Repair),. Chongjin Shipyard and the other “ports” appear to be mainly coastal vessels with the largest ship I’ve seen measuring less than 30 meters long by 4.5 meters wide. If we assumed these could be ocean going vessels, then each one might hold four cargo contains or about 380 centrifuges as compared to the 61 cargo containers needed for a “standard” cascade interconnect bomb plant. It, of course, makes a lot of sense for North Korea to be emphasizing coastal vessels considering how mountainous the terrain is. Only Rajin appears (at least to on my search) to be the only one with port-based cranes for moving cargo. Yuktae-dong has large quays but the large ship visible has ship-based crane. That, of course, means that the other ports could be used by those ocean-going ships with their own cranes if the harbor is accessible to them. On the plus side, however, the North is missing a lot of the lovely crinkly bits, as Slartibartfast might say, that South Korea has and that might make wonderful temporary harbors.

Now, compare the Port of Rajin with the Port of Busan in South Korea. Busan has a ton of ships just waiting at anchor to get their turn at the docks to load/unload. I’ve circled just some of the 200+ meter long ships at anchor. I stopped when I got tired of doing it. This snapshot might be an even better way of judging the international trade of the two countries than the tonnage of flagged ships since the North and South have similar numbers of ships carrying their flags. The difference in harbor occupation is obviously made up of ships flagged by different countries. One thing the West has going for it in terms of following WMD shipping leaving or coming into the DPRK is, therefore, the dearth of ocean-going shipping. If an ocean going ship is detected, it might be easy to follow.

Of course, it might be very hard to discriminate the loading of WMD related equipment from, say, a load of pig iron. Perhaps the only clue might be the extra security associated with transporting centrifuges or other sensitive equipment. Depending on how efficiently the cranes are run, it might take up to five minutes for each container to loaded onboard though it could take considerably shorter. Of course, if they are loading an entire bomb production plant, this could correspond to up to five hours. All of which could be done at night with minimal lighting on the security force.

Tomorrow, we will consider the frequency of visits over the ports by photoreconnaissance satellites as well as viewing them from UAVs.