Did Iran test a nuke in North Korea?

It would be a very serious matter if Iran had tested a nuclear weapon in North Korea in 2010, as this German language report in Die Welt claims. The claim has received much less attention in the U.S. press than it would seem to merit, and most bloggers who have picked up the story have merely wondered aloud whether it could be true (the notable exception being Stephan Haggard). I’ll add my summation of the evidence to Stephan’s, but I’ll also leverage the OFK archives to add some additional circumstantial evidence suggesting that the claim, though not proven, is plausible.

The best translation/summary of the claim is at the Jerusalem Post, of all places, and it tells us a bit more about the source of this allegation, a man named Hans Ruhle, “who directed the planning department of the German Defense Ministry from 1982 to 1988,” and who it claims is “widely respected among defense and security officials in Germany.” Drilling down further, the article claims that “some” or “many” intelligence agencies incline to the view that Iran has tested a nuke in North Korea, although the article tells us nothing about which agencies arrived at that view, or what the evidentiary basis for that view is. European intelligence agencies seldom have the reach that ours do, so they often get their intelligence second-hand, from the CIA. In this case, however, the conclusion may be based on open sources. This particular claim appears to originate, at least in part, from Swedish Nuclear Physicist Lars-Erik de Geer, who spent a year studying data from a private network of radioisotope-monitoring stations before publishing his conclusions in the British scientific journal Nature.

Remember that weird story back in May of 2010, when the North Koreans claimed to have achieved nuclear fusion? Most observers ridiculed the story, but that network of monitoring stations picked up some anomalies that lent the claim some corroboration:

The news was largely ridiculed in the South Korean and Western media — but it was not so quickly dismissed by the small circle of experts who devote their careers to identifying covert nuclear tests. South Korean scientists had detected a whiff of radioactive xenon at around that time, hinting at nuclear activity in its northern neighbour, which had already tested nuclear devices in 2006 and 2009.

In August 2010, experts meeting in Vienna informally discussed the South Korean data and measurements from an international network of radioisotope-monitoring stations operated by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), which supports an as-yet-unratified treaty that seeks to ban nuclear-weapons testing. Among those experts was Lars-Erik De Geer, an atmospheric scientist at the Swedish Defence Research Agency in Stockholm. When they looked at the monitoring data from Russian and Japanese stations close to North Korea, “the conclusion from everyone was, ‘Hell, we cannot explain them.'”, De Geer recalls.

Unwilling to let the matter rest, De Geer took the radioisotope data and compared them with the South Korean reports, as well as meteorological records. After a year of work, he has concluded that North Korea carried out two small nuclear tests in April and May 2010 that caused explosions in the range of 50″“200 tonnes of TNT equivalent. The types and ratios of isotopes detected, he says, suggest that North Korea was testing materials and techniques intended to boost the yield of its weapons. His paper will appear in the April/May issue of the journal Science and Global Security. [Nature, ht Israel Matsav]

Significantly, De Geer claimed that this was indicative of a test of a small uranium device, “in the range of 50-200 tons of TNT.” You may have heard those stories about North Korea having a uranium enrichment program, but as everyone now knows, Dick Cheney and John Bolton made it all up.

Having gotten that out of my system, I’ll add that a test of this size probably wouldn’t register as much more than background noise on a seismograph (small earthquakes are very common). By comparison, North Korea’s 2009 test measured a modest 4.7 on the Richter scale after a yield estimated between 2 and 8 kilotons. Its 2006 test registered 4.2, at a yield of just under a kiloton.

Interestingly enough, this is not the first published report of Iran testing a nuke in North Korea. Back in 2007, the London Daily Telegraph reported this:

North Korea is helping Iran to prepare an underground nuclear test similar to the one Pyongyang carried out last year. Under the terms of a new understanding between the two countries, the North Koreans have agreed to share all the data and information they received from their successful test last October with Teheran’s nuclear scientists. [….]

A senior European defence official told The Daily Telegraph that North Korea had invited a team of Iranian nuclear scientists to study the results of last October’s underground test to assist Teheran’s preparations to conduct its own — possibly by the end of this year.

There were unconfirmed reports at the time of the Korean firing that an Iranian team was present. Iranian military advisers regularly visit North Korea to participate in missile tests. Now the long-standing military co-operation between the countries has been extended to nuclear issues. As a result, senior western military officials are deeply concerned that the North Koreans’ technical superiority will allow the Iranians to accelerate development of their own nuclear weapon.

“The Iranians are working closely with the North Koreans to study the results of last year’s North Korean nuclear bomb test,” said the European defence official. [The Telegraph]

There have been long-standing suspicions of nuclear cooperation between Iran and North Korea, and there is conclusive evidence of nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Iran’s ally Syria, possibly enabled with Iranian funding.

Would North Korea cross the line to joint nuclear testing with other countries? Some in our intelligence community have long believed that North Korea conducted its first nuclear test way back in 1998. In Pakistan.

North Korea’s proliferation relationship with Iran is broad and deep. There have been reports of North Korean technicians working in Iran, and vice versa. Most of the cooperation that’s been described in open sources relates to the countries’ missile programs, but according to multiple published reports, Iran and North Korea have a long cooperative relationship in the development of chemical weapons, including a mysterious explosion in Syria in 2004, reported cooperation in putting chemical warheads on missiles, and North Korea shipping chemical protective suits to Iran’s closest ally, Syria.

Most of this evidence is circumstantial. It doesn’t confirm the latest report, but it certainly makes it plausible. And given the reason why we can’t confirm any of this, I tend not to assign North Korea and Iran the benefit of the doubt.

8 Responses

  1. At the Die Welt link, Hans Rühle says that if an Iranian bomb was tested in North Korea, that wouldn’t be unusual. As another example of a test in foreign territory, he cites the “Vela Incident” — on 22 September, 1979, an American satellite detected an Israeli neutron-bomb explosion near a South African island.

  2. What a really interesting report.

    The problem is not testing for others (the USA tested nuclear weapons for the UK at the Arizona testing grounds,) but who those others are– Pakistan, North Korea and Iran are an unholy trinity.

    50-200 tons yield is extremely low: we’ve achieved it, but our lowest tactical nuke in service was 300 tons. Such weapons are destabilizing because they are “tactical” in nature, under the control and discretion of field officers. They are particularly difficult to control by “permissive action linkage” since one of their uses is premised on loss of prior strategic permission.

    Given the nature of dictatorships, the Kims are likely to be particularly averse to the creation of such weapons because whoever holds even one of them holds a trump in a coup.

    Iran might have more use for them inasmuch as they could be used to destroy marine landing forces (if they fight back) or oil ports quickly (in case of national suicide.) If they can be installed in a Silkworm missile, they are a nightmare for any aircraft carrier battle group. If Iran has a supply of these, then they certainly can close the Straits of Hormuz, and they don’t even need 10,000 floating mines.

    This is the kind of nuke that I have always assumed Saudi Arabia has hidden away somewhere.

  3. Neither deserves the benefit of the doubt.

    The reasons for doubt are that NK usually brags that they’ve set off a bomb, and that Iran would be ill advised to let a bomb of theirs onto the territory of someone who steals rail cars from a neighbor who has more ways to retaliate than Iran does. If they’ll steal rail cars they’ll steal a bomb.

    Some online sources claim that bombs look different on seismographs than earthquakes do. It’s believable since you can tell one type of earthquake from another given a seismograph trace. http://www.ctbto.org/faqs/?Fsize=kuyzyweqhcib1%2Bor%2B1%3D%40&uid=75&cHash=4a384ebfa8

    ” in most of Europe, Asia, and North Africa, the system can detect tests as small as .03-.06 kilotons in hard rock”: http://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/united-states-and-ctbt/. But there are known techniques for “muffling” the seismic signature of an explosion.

    “For some locations (such as Russia’s nuclear test site at Novaya Zemlya) the use of seismic arrays and nearby seismic stations have lowered the detection threshold to below 0.01 kilotons. “: http://www.acronym.org.uk/dd/dd91/91tgdh.htm . Seismic data from underground chemical explosions show that far lower yield explosions would have been detected in the Korean region – in fact as low as 0.002 kilotons “: same source. But that is a partisan source devoted to promoting the CTBT, which might be biased toward making the monitoring systems look good.

    I also wonder if you can get a valid test of tritium boosting from an explosion that small, but I don’t know enough about bomb design to have an opinion.

    If there wasn’t a test, then the question of where the radioactive xenon came from needs an answer.

  4. What was it that I read a long time ago on here about a nuclear facility being lifted from NK and sent to Iran? Something about the facade of the building, the shape of it, like a V or something, being recognized in satellite imagery from the North and in a regular photograph in Iran… My details are vague I know, but I just know I read about something like this on here within the last couple of years. Joshua, can you help, or maybe someone else have a clue?

  5. Remember back about a decade ago there was the “fertilizer” explosion on train just as it crossed into north Korea from China? At the time it was suggested the train was carrying something it shouldn’t have been and was targeted by the USA. I remember aerial photos showed that the blast site was about 100-200 meters from the rail-line.

  6. Axis-shmaxis lives! Iran and North Korea have agreed to cooperate in science and technology, because they have common enemies. Read all about it at Reuters.