In December 2023, I REMARK Something special about satellite imaging of Pyongyang Sunan International Airport in North Korea: an old Soviet freight plane was modified with structural pylons above its wings.
I assessed that these pylons could support a radar, which would transform this freight plane into a flying early alert system capable of detecting missiles and enemy aircraft from Hundreds of kilometers far. This evaluation was confirmed on March 27, when the North Korean leader Kim Jong a turned The interior of the plane, offering the public its first overview of the finished system.
These surveillance capacities will help North Korea keep an eye on South Korean and American military assets to move to the peninsula. In the event of an attack, the plane could detect incoming cruise missiles long before entering North Korean airspace.
But perhaps even more important, this plane could also help North Korea finally solve a technological problem that has rallied it for decades: successfully develop warheads for its intercontinental, or ICBMS missiles, capable of entering the atmosphere.
Airborne radar systems, Developed in the 1950s are common food for advanced soldiers because they offer two key advantages. First and foremost, they allow the air forces of a country to better see enemy planes. Although the power of the radar must be somewhat limited to what can adapt inside the plane, an airborne radar can fly at high altitude, moving in the positions best suited to the monitoring of specific targets. Unlike the platforms radar on the ground, an airborne radar is also less limited by the annoying curvature of the earth and is therefore capable of seeing low-flight planes, such as cruise missiles, at distances much further than ground systems.
This last part is particularly a problem for North Korea, whose mountainous land makes it difficult to detect incoming cruise missiles. For example, a radar on the North Korean ground in a valley may not see an enemy cruise missile in the next valley. An airborne warning aircraft can look at these valleys from above, which gives a precious warning time of North Korean leadership before these missiles reach their targets. Such a plane could also see ballistic missiles die out of South Korean launch sites from much further than radar on the ground.
Second, air radar platforms can be equipped with advanced communication technologies that allow its operators to network with other planes and share information on targets. North Korea is known to use its remaining tactical bombers as cruise missile Transporters, therefore an airplane equipped with radar and communications could inform tactical bombers in real time on which they should shoot.
However, there are limits to these advantages. North Korea has an extremely limited inventory of freight aircraft adapted to modify in this way, and so far, it has produced only one system. Because it cannot remain indefinitely in the air, this single plane cannot provide continuous coverage of North Korea. Instead, he will probably fly intermittently and during crises and to keep an eye on the military exercises led by South Korea or the United States.
North Korea has not exploited an early airborne alert system before, but it is not clear if it is due to a lack of interest or a lack of technological capacity. It is possible that North Korea previously judged that these systems would be useless in a conflict due to American and South Korean air superiority, and something has changed this opinion. It is also possible that recent technological transfers from Russia have resolved technological and production bottlenecks from North Korea; Russian weapons have already been seen in North Korean shipsIt is therefore clearly possible but not proven.
In addition to making precious contributions to Kim’s life expectancy, warning him before decapitationAn airborne radar could help North Korea perfect its arsenal booming ICBMS.
North Korea has tried and has struggled to build an ICBM since at least the 1990s, when the best it could bring together was to shake the old Soviet drawings. In the years that followed, North Korea has made immense progress and now deploys a number of ICBMs made at national level with proven range capacities.
But a North Korean ICBMS zone has not proven itself is the technology of back-to-school vehicles. Nuclear warheads must be locked in heat -resistant materials to survive at the atmospheric back to school, but Pyongyang has not yet demonstrated a mastery of this technology. Over the past decade, North Korea conduit 14 ICBM tests, and none has proven in a conclusive manner that the country has developed a back -to -school vehicle capable of maintaining a back to school. Adm. Samuel Paparo, the head of the American Indo-Pacific Order, do As much last November, declaring: “We have not yet seen this capacity, but we just see continuous tests on this subject.”
A key obstacle in the development of back -to -school vehicles was the geography of North Korea. ICBMs have a range of 6,200 miles or more, and North Korea, a relatively small country, is only 620 miles at its smallest point. More boring for North Korea, he cannot get into the Pacific very often, because it requires a launch on Japan, risking falling and killing Japanese civilians. Of the 14 ICBM tests of North Korea and many other long -range missile tests, only two have survived in Japan – reducing the fear and agitation of Tokyo each time.
For this reason, North Korea was forced to test its ICBMs at very short distances in the Japan Sea, towards a 10th in its planned range. This situation is not ideal, because the shooting of an ICBM on such short ranges puts unique stress on the back -to -school vehicle. On a normal trajectory of more than 6,200 miles, an ICBM is launched at around an angle of 45 degrees. While the warhead enters the atmosphere and returns to the earth, it does it gradually, with relatively low quantities of heat stress on the back -to -school vehicle. But when the scope of an ICBM is shortened, it must be pulled on stiff angles. This means that instead of gradually entering, the warhead screams through the atmosphere at an almost perpendicular angle on the surface of the earth, causing extremely high speeds and temperatures. For North Korea, it is not a great environment to test a new back -to -school vehicle: it is like learning to hit a baseball with the pitching machine defined in its highest setting.
To make matters worse, North Korea probably has no way to monitor if its back -to -school vehicles work. Due to the curvature of the earth, the North Korean telemetry stations probably lose track of the ICBMS after having exceeded about 87 miles above sea level, long before the Karman line indicating the start of the earth’s atmosphere. This means that North Korea probably has only a limited understanding of the moment when its back -to -school vehicles fail and why.
None of this means that the threat of North Korea ICBMS is zero – in progress. Although the back-to-school vehicles in North Korea can be unreliable or perhaps inaccurate, this does not guarantee that they would not work. However, the fact that North Korea does not demonstrate conclusive the return capacity of its missiles drowns the credibility of its deterrent forces. If Kim cannot convince Washington that it can maintain target targets, the United States may feel more ready to intervene on the peninsula.
North Korean airborne radar can help solve these problems. Even if North Korea continues to limit itself to short-term tests, such a plane could stroll through the Japanese Sea and follow back-to-school vehicles going down, collecting data on their precision and, if the Warshead had to fail and break, detect when and, perhaps, why
To a lesser extent, the geography of North Korea also creates problems for its cruise missile tests. North Korea has piloted its missiles in an eight -year -old scheme right next to its east coast to test the endurance of its systems. The problem with this arrangement is that such a model does not precisely reflect the functioning of the combat missile.
As discussed above, North Korea is very concerned about the South Korean and American cruise missiles below its radar. However, North Korea works simultaneously on the same capacities and has deployed the Hwasal series of conventional cruise missiles and the pulhwasal series of nuclear cruise missiles.
Cruise missiles use several unique methods to guide towards the target, including the radar and the Look cameras that correspond to the surrounding terrain for the images stored in the missile computers. It is a delicate technology for working. The first version of the American Cruise Missile Tomahawk used in the Desert Storm operation in 1991 had a success rate of About 50%. The United States has considerably improved this success rate in the following decades, but for North Korea, a state with a much more limited technological base, this can be closer to its starting point.
These orientation technologies require a lot of land tests and data to function properly, and here an airborne radar could help. An airborne radar could follow and follow a cruise missile test with much higher precision than radar on the ground. Russia has a special plane for this purpose – the “jump” from IL -76LL – which uses exactly the same type of plane as the North Korean version.
In tests and development, An airborne radar offers unique capacities in North Korea that it could not only achieve with stations on the ground. On the side of the operational war, an airborne radar could see incoming South Korean and American missiles, which gives North Korea a precious warning time. On the side of missile tests, an airborne radar capacity could give North Korea the data it needs to improve its design of ICBM reintegration vehicles, potentially shaving a considerable free time.
Of course, this system is not a miracle solution. He will not say to North Korea why his thermal shields of the ICBMS fail but simply offer clues to the way and the moment when failures occur. The lack of material for thermal shields or the simple lack of understanding of these materials can still choose the missile program of North Korea if it cannot obtain equipment abroad. But an airborne radar platform can always give the data from North Korea that he cruelly needs – which brings him closer to the deadliest weapon in the world.