Even if that were true, which it is not, they would still have a price both sides agreed to. Otherwise, they would always be trying to solve questions like “How many oranges for a SCUD?” Money is a very useful concept, even when it is totally abstract.

Analyzing the sale of major weapons as a purely free market may not be entirely useful. In far more open exchanges of advanced weapons there are frequent accusations of unfair competition, politicization, and bribery. Have we become so cynical that we now believe the North Koreans and Syrians are more logical and professional in their arms deals than we are?

The experience from the Russians entering the space launch market pretty much made it clear that the costing / pricing for non-fully-commercial parties is essentially monopoly money. Someone’s getting paid, but you need to see the full books and understand all the system effects with the way that nation’s economy is managed to see what’s really going on.

India did not buy a single missile from North Korea. It already had the indigenously-built Prithvi missile.

Politically speaking, missile proliferation provides the leverage for North Korea against the US. This kind of leverage has usually been in the hands of USA, Russia & China. It forces the USA to play nice with North Korea.

Thanks very much for your thoughtful and very informative comments. I look forward to the publication of your study on North Korea’s role in missile proliferation around the world. It will be an important contribution to the field on proliferation studies.

North Korea has sold at least 490 Soviet-style Scud missiles to Pakistan, India and Middle Eastern countries since 1991, a South Korean scholar said Wednesday.
The sales have earned the Asian country $ 1 billion a year in badly needed cash, said Kim Chul-hwan, a professor at the Korean National Defense University.
“North Korea builds missiles for exports,” he said at an international seminar.
Washington has identified North Korea as the world’s No. 1 exporter of missile equipment and technology.
This week, the North’s communist government pledged to freeze testing of its long-range missiles during talks with the United States on improving relations.
Kim said North Korea completed plants in 1991 that enable the country to produce up to 150 Scud-B and Scud-C missiles a year.
So far North Korea has sold 160 Scud-Bs to Iran, 100 to Iraq and 18 to the United Arab Emirates, Kim said. The Scud-B is believed to have been modified from the old Soviet design and to have a range of 210 miles, the distance between New York and Washington, D.C.
Syria has bought 150 North Korean Scud-Cs, which have a range of 341 miles. Iran bought 42, and India bought 20, Kim said.
Since 1996, the United States has held a series of talks with North Korea on curbing its development and export of missiles. North Korea has rebuffed U.S. demands, saying self-defense is the inalienable right of any sovereign nation.
It reportedly has demanded $1 billion annually for three years in return for stopping exports of missiles and missile technology.
(Associated Press, Sep. 15, 1999)

Somewhere out there, there are bound to be price lists issued by the North Koreans, just as there were quotes issued by Khan. But I wouldn’t know where to look to find those.

Re: Khan, I omitted one of the more interesting details from the “Project A.B.” document that appears on the ISIS website: $5 million for a bomb design!

Unfortunately, being within a factor of five isn’t very useful. It wouldn’t, for instance, see any difference between the $220 K for a SCUD that I derive from reports about what a California collector paid for a SCUD (and TEL) and the $1 million quoted in the Zaloga book. However, all the other numbers in my table have a high level of confidence.

The problem with some of the numbers Josh has quoted is that it is uncertain exactly what is being referred to. Take the Khan $50 million. He says it was for “technology.” That could mean for know-how. If so, it is probably fairly reasonable. That implies that Pakistan thought it was sufficiently familiar with production processes etc that it could design its own production line. Pakistan (and India) did almost exactly that when they licensed solid propellant technology from France for producing sounding rockets. In that case, however, France did supply a list of production equipment to be used as well as a list of suppliers for that equipment. That too, might be possible for North Korea to do and to include in “know-how.” (I think this is what proliferation will look like in the future, but again, that is the subject for a future post.) Then again, Khan could have meant production equipment when he said “technology.” In that case, it is unreasonably low. It is that ambiguity in many of these reports that makes them hard to use.

Is a Scud sufficiently comparable (technologically) to some older missile from France, UK, USA? If so then maybe it’s possible to use actual prices from these countries’ historic defence budgets to put some bounds on what it costs to produce a Scud. Admittedly production technologies have moved on since a few decades ago, but I’m guessing that the answer may still be within a factor of five or so. I suppose if one knew how much skilled labour it takes to build a Scud then – on the assumption that material costs remain about constant relative to the rest of the economy – it might even be possible to refine the estimate using a labour-cost price escalation.

Missiles are out of my expertise, but it would certainly be handy if there were some way to reject patently implausible reported values in Josh’s summary, and then maybe just average the rest.