NoKo Crossed the Nuclear Power Threshold, 60?

Posted on August 8, 2017August 8, 2017 by Denise Simon

The best defense is to take them out before they are fired…..we can and we know where they are.

We Know the Locations of N Korea Nuclear Sites

Primer: North Korean delegation wraps up Iran visit

Trip included opening of new embassy and meetings with foreign representatives

North Korea’s newly built embassy in Tehran opened Wednesday, according to the North’s state-run KCNA news agency. It said the new embassy was “built to boost exchanges, contacts and cooperation between the two countries for world peace and security and international justice.”

After the second ICBM test last month, defense experts said it appeared North Korea’s long-range ballistic missile had the range to reach half, if not most, of the continental United States. Iran could have an ICBM capability similar to North Korea within a few years, as just last week it successfully launched a satellite-carrying rocket that some see as a precursor to long-range ballistic missile weapon capability.

‘Extensive’ missile cooperation

“There’s been fairly extensive cooperation on missiles,” said Bunn. “And in fact, early generations of Iranian missiles were thought to be basically modestly adapted North Korean missiles.” More here.

North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say

North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.

The new analysis completed last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency comes on the heels of another intelligence assessment that sharply raises the official estimate for the total number of bombs in the communist country’s atomic arsenal. The U.S. calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some independent experts believe the number of bombs is much smaller.

The findings are likely to deepen concerns about an evolving North Korean military threat that appears to be advancing far more rapidly than many experts had predicted. U.S. officials last month concluded that Pyongyang is also outpacing expectations in its effort to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking cities on the American mainland.

While more than a decade has passed since North Korea’s first nuclear detonation, many analysts believed it would be years before the country’s weapons scientists could design a compact warhead that could be delivered by missile to distant targets. But the new assessment, a summary document dated July 28, concludes that this critical milestone has already been reached.

“The IC [intelligence community] assesses North Korea has produced nuclear weapons for ballistic missile delivery, to include delivery by ICBM-class missiles,” the assessment states, in an excerpt read to The Washington Post. The assessment’s broad conclusions were verified by two U.S. officials familiar with the document. It is not yet known whether the reclusive regime has successfully tested the smaller design, although North Korean officially last year claimed to have done so.

The DIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

An assessment this week by the Japanese Ministry of Defense also concludes there is evidence to suggest that North Korea has achieved miniaturization.

Kim Jong Un is becoming increasingly confident in the reliability of his nuclear arsenal, analysts have concluded, explaining perhaps the dictator’s willingness to engage in defiant behavior, including missile tests that have drawn criticism even from North Korea’s closest ally, China. On Saturday, both China and Russia joined other members of the U.N. Security Council in approving punishing new economic sanctions, including a ban on exports that supply up to a third of North Korea’s annual $3 billion earnings.

The nuclear progress further raises the stakes for President Trump, who has vowed that North Korea will never be allowed to threaten the United States with nuclear weapons. In an interview broadcast Saturday on MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt Show, national security adviser H.R. McMaster said the prospect of a North Korea armed with nuclear-tipped ICBMs would be “intolerable, from the president’s perspective.”

“We have to provide all options . . . and that includes a military option,” he said. But McMaster said the administration would do everything short of war to “pressure Kim Jong Un and those around him, such that they conclude it is in their interest to denuclearize.” The options said to be under discussion ranged from new multilateral negotiations to reintroducing U.S. battlefield nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula, officials familiar with internal discussions said.

Determining the precise makeup of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal has long been a difficult challenge for intelligence professionals because of the regime’s culture of extreme secrecy and insularity. The country’s weapons scientists have conducted five nuclear tests since 2006, the latest being a 20- to 30-kiloton detonation on Sept. 9, 2016, that produced a blast estimated to be up to twice that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

But producing a compact nuclear warhead that can fit inside a missile is a technically demanding feat, one that many analysts believed was still beyond North Korea’s grasp. Last year, state-run media in Pyongyang displayed a spherical device that government spokesmen described as a miniaturized nuclear warhead, but whether it was a real bomb remained unclear. North Korean officials described the September detonation as a successful test of a small warhead designed to fit on a missile, though many experts were skeptical of the claim.

Kim has repeatedly proclaimed his intention to field a fleet of nuclear-tipped ICBMs as a guarantor of his regime’s survival. His regime took a major step toward that goal last month with the first successful tests of a missile with intercontinental range. Video analysis of the latest test revealed that the missile caught fire and apparently disintegrated as it plunged back toward Earth’s surface, suggesting North Korea’s engineers are not yet capable of building a reentry vehicle that can carry the warhead safely through the upper atmosphere. But U.S. analysts and many independent experts believe that this hurdle will be overcome by late next year.

“What initially looked like a slow-motion Cuban missile crisis is now looking more like the Manhattan Project, just barreling along,” said Robert Litwak, a nonproliferation expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of “Preventing North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout,” published by the center this year. “There’s a sense of urgency behind the program that is new to the Kim Jong Un era.”

While few discount North Korea’s progress, some prominent U.S. experts warned against the danger of overestimating the threat. Siegfried Hecker, director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the last known U.S. official to personally inspect North Korea’s nuclear facilities, has calculated the size of North Korea’s arsenal at no more than 20 to 25 bombs. Hecker warned of potential risks that can come from making Kim into a bigger menace than he actually is.

“Overselling is particularly dangerous,” said Hecker, who visited North Korea seven times between 2004 and 2010 and met with key leaders of the country’s weapons programs. “Some like to depict Kim as being crazy – a madman – and that makes the public believe that the guy is undeterrable. He’s not crazy and he’s not suicidal. And he’s not even unpredictable.”

“The real threat,” Hecker said, “is we’re going to stumble into a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula.”

In the past, U.S. intelligence agencies have occasionally overestimated the North Korean threat. In the early 2000s, the George W. Bush administration assessed that Pyongyang was close to developing an ICBM that could strike the U.S. mainland – a prediction that missed the mark by more than a decade. More recently, however, analysts and policymakers have been taken repeatedly by surprise as North Korea achieved key milestones months or years ahead of schedule, noted Jeffrey Lewis, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies’ East Asia Nonproliferation Program. There was similar skepticism about China’s capabilities in the early 1960s, said Lewis, who has studied that country’s pathway to a successful nuclear test in 1964.

“There is no reason to think that the North Koreans aren’t making the same progress after so many successful nuclear explosions,” Lewis said. “The big question is why do we hold the North Koreans to a different standard than we held [Joseph] Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China? North Korea is testing underground, so we’re always going to lack a lot of details. But it seems to me a lot of people are insisting on impossible levels of proof because they simply don’t want to accept what should be pretty obvious.”

We Know the Locations of N Korea Nuclear Sites

Posted on August 2, 2017August 2, 2017 by Denise Simon

Within a measure of feet…..

The United States has likely deployed the Global Hawk. An RQ-4 Global Hawk soars through the sky to record intelligence, surveillence and reconnaissance data. Air Force and Navy officials met to discuss joint training with the RQ-4. (Courtesy photo)

Mission
The RQ-4 Global Hawk is a high-altitude, long-endurance, remotely piloted aircraft with an integrated sensor suite that provides global all-weather, day or night intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capability. Global Hawk’s mission is to provide a broad spectrum of ISR collection capability to support joint combatant forces in worldwide peacetime, contingency and wartime operations. The Global Hawk provides persistent near-real-time coverage using imagery intelligence (IMINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT) and moving target indicator (MTI) sensors.

Features
Global Hawk is currently fielded in three distinct blocks. Seven Block 10 aircraft were procured, but were retired from the Air Force inventory in 2011. Block 20s were initially fielded with IMINT-only capabilities, but three Block 20s have been converted to an EQ-4 communication relay configuration, carrying the Battlefield Airborne Communication Node (BACN) payload. Block 30 is a multi-intelligence platform that simultaneously carries electro-optical, infrared, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and high and low band SIGINT sensors. Block 30 Initial Operating Capability (IOC) was declared in August 2011. Eighteen Block 30s are currently fielded, supporting every geographic combatant command as well as combat missions in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom/ New Dawn. Block 30s also supported Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya and humanitarian relief efforts during Operation Tomodachi in Japan. Block 40 carries the Radar Technology Insertion Program (RTIP) active electronically scanned array radar which provides MTI and SAR data. Block 40 Early Operating Capability (EOC) was declared in Sep 2013 and eleven Block 40s are currently fielded, supporting operations in four combatant commands.

Add other resources already in theater including the THAAD systems and we can determine the locations at least within a differential of feet and we can likely predict the location of the next launch. When it comes to cyber activity and the NSA, be assured those systems are in full use as well.

THAAD Terminal High-Altitude Area Defence

Thanks to dedicated scientists in the United States in key locations, they work wonders by reading waves and ripples and testing air.

How earthquake scientists eavesdrop on North Korea’s nuclear blasts

Waves and ripples in the Earth can reveal the location and depth of an explosion

NUCLEAR SHAKEDOWN Rumblings of seismic waves reveal clues about North Korea’s nuclear weapons tests, detonated in a mountain. Nicolle Rager Fuller

On September 9 of last year, in the middle of the morning, seismometers began lighting up around East Asia. From South Korea to Russia to Japan, geophysical instruments recorded squiggles as seismic waves passed through and shook the ground. It looked as if an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.2 had just happened. But the ground shaking had originated at North Korea’s nuclear weapons test site.

It was the fifth confirmed nuclear test in North Korea, and it opened the latest chapter in a long-running geologic detective story. Like a police examiner scrutinizing skid marks to figure out who was at fault in a car crash, researchers analyze seismic waves to determine if they come from a natural earthquake or an artificial explosion. If the latter, then scientists can also tease out details such as whether the blast was nuclear and how big it was. Test after test, seismologists are improving their understanding of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

The work feeds into international efforts to monitor the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which since 1996 has banned nuclear weapons testing. More than 180 countries have signed the treaty. But 44 countries that hold nuclear technology must both sign and ratify the treaty for it to have the force of law. Eight, including the United States and North Korea, have not.

To track potential violations, the treaty calls for a four-pronged international monitoring system, which is currently about 90 percent complete. Hydroacoustic stations can detect sound waves from underwater explosions. Infrasound stations listen for low-frequency sound waves rumbling through the atmosphere. Radionuclide stations sniff the air for the radioactive by-products of an atmospheric test. And seismic stations pick up the ground shaking, which is usually the fastest and most reliable method for confirming an underground explosion.

Seismic waves offer extra information about an explosion, new studies show. One research group is exploring how local topography, like the rugged mountain where the North Korean government conducts its tests, puts its imprint on the seismic signals. Knowing that, scientists can better pinpoint where the explosions are happening within the mountain — thus improving understanding of how deep and powerful the blasts are. A deep explosion is more likely to mask the power of the bomb.

Story continues after map

EARS TO THE GROUND Using seismic wave data, researchers calculated the likely locations of five nuclear tests in North Korea’s Mount Mantap (satellite image shown).

S.J. GIBBONS ET AL/GEOPHYS. J. INT. 2017, GOOGLE EARTH

Separately, physicists have conducted an unprecedented set of six explosions at the U.S. nuclear test site in Nevada. The aim was to mimic the physics of a nuclear explosion by detonating chemical explosives and watching how the seismic waves radiate outward. It’s like a miniature, nonnuclear version of a nuclear weapons test. Already, the scientists have made some key discoveries, such as understanding how a deeply buried blast shows up in the seismic detectors.

The more researchers can learn about the seismic calling card of each blast, the more they can understand international developments. That’s particularly true for North Korea, where leaders have been ramping up the pace of military testing since the first nuclear detonation in 2006. On July 4, the country launched its first confirmed ballistic missile — with no nuclear payload — that could reach as far as Alaska.

“There’s this building of knowledge that helps you understand the capabilities of a country like North Korea,” says Delaine Reiter, a geophysicist with Weston Geophysical Corp. in Lexington, Mass. “They’re not shy about broadcasting their testing, but they claim things Western scientists aren’t sure about. Was it as big as they claimed? We’re really interested in understanding that.”

Natural or not

Seismometers detect ground shaking from all sorts of events. In a typical year, anywhere from 1,200 to 2,200 earthquakes of magnitude 5 and greater set off the machines worldwide. On top of that is the unnatural shaking: from quarry blasts, mine collapses and other causes. The art of using seismic waves to tell one type of event from the others is known as forensic seismology.

Forensic seismologists work to distinguish a natural earthquake from what could be a clandestine nuclear test. In March 2003, for instance, seismometers detected a disturbance coming from near Lop Nor, a dried-up lake in western China that the Chinese government, which signed but hasn’t ratified the test ban treaty, has used for nuclear tests. Seismologists needed to figure out immediately what had happened.

One test for telling the difference between an earthquake and an explosion is how deep it is. Anything deeper than about 10 kilometers is almost certain to be natural. In the case of Lop Nor, the source of the waves seemed to be located about six kilometers down — difficult to tunnel to, but not impossible. Researchers also used a second test, which compares the amplitudes of two different kinds of seismic waves.

Earthquakes and explosions generate several types of seismic waves, starting with P, or primary, waves. These waves are the first to arrive at a distant station. Next come S, or secondary, waves, which travel through the ground in a shearing motion, taking longer to arrive. Finally come waves that ripple across the surface, including those called Rayleigh waves.

In an explosion as compared with an earthquake, the amplitudes of Rayleigh waves are smaller than those of the P waves. By looking at those two types of waves, scientists determined the Lop Nor incident was a natural earthquake, not a secretive explosion. (Seismology cannot reveal the entire picture. Had the Lop Nor event actually been an explosion, researchers would have needed data from the radionuclide monitoring network to confirm the blast came from nuclear and not chemical explosives.)

For North Korea, the question is not so much whether the government is setting off nuclear tests, but how powerful and destructive those blasts might be. In 2003, the country withdrew from the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, an international agreement distinct from the testing ban that aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and related technology. Three years later, North Korea announced it had conducted an underground nuclear test in Mount Mantap at a site called Punggye-ri, in the northeastern part of the country. It was the first nuclear weapons test since India and Pakistan each set one off in 1998.

By analyzing seismic wave data from monitoring stations around the region, seismologists concluded the North Korean blast had come from shallow depths, no more than a few kilometers within the mountain. That supported the North Korean government’s claim of an intentional test. Two weeks later, a radionuclide monitoring station in Yellowknife, Canada, detected increases in radioactive xenon, which presumably had leaked out of the underground test site and drifted eastward. The blast was nuclear.

But the 2006 test raised fresh questions for seismologists. The ratio of amplitudes of the Rayleigh and P waves was not as distinctive as it usually is for an explosion. And other aspects of the seismic signature were also not as clear-cut as scientists had expected.

Researchers got some answers as North Korea’s testing continued. In 2009, 2013 and twice in 2016, the government set off more underground nuclear explosions at Punggye-ri. Each time, researchers outside the country compared the seismic data with the record of past nuclear blasts. Automated computer programs “compare the wiggles you see on the screen ripple for ripple,” says Steven Gibbons, a seismologist with the NORSAR monitoring organization in Kjeller, Norway. When the patterns match, scientists know it is another test. “A seismic signal generated by an explosion is like a fingerprint for that particular region,” he says.

With each test, researchers learned more about North Korea’s capabilities. By analyzing the magnitude of the ground shaking, experts could roughly calculate the power of each test. The 2006 explosion was relatively small, releasing energy equivalent to about 1,000 tons of TNT — a fraction of the 15-kiloton bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. But the yield of North Korea’s nuclear tests crept up each time, and the most recent test, in September 2016, may have exceeded the size of the Hiroshima bomb.

This U.S. atmospheric nuclear test took place in April 1953 in Nevada. No surprise, North Korea’s buried tests are harder to spot.

CTBTO/FLICKR (CC BY 2.0)

Digging deep

For an event of a particular seismic magnitude, the deeper the explosion, the more energetic the blast. A shallow, less energetic test can look a lot like a deeply buried, powerful blast. Scientists need to figure out precisely where each explosion occurred.

Mount Mantap is a rugged granite mountain with geology that complicates the physics of how seismic waves spread. Western experts do not know exactly how the nuclear bombs are placed inside the mountain before being detonated. But satellite imagery shows activity that looks like tunnels being dug into the mountainside. The tunnels could be dug two ways: straight into the granite or spiraled around in a fishhook pattern to collapse and seal the site after a test, Frank Pabian, a nonproliferation expert at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said in April in Denver at a meeting of the Seismological Society of America.

Researchers have been trying to figure out the relative locations of each of the five tests. By comparing the amplitudes of the P, S and Rayleigh waves, and calculating how long each would have taken to travel through the ground, researchers can plot the likely sites of the five blasts. That allows them to better tie the explosions to the infrastructure on the surface, like the tunnels spotted in satellite imagery.

One big puzzle arose after the 2009 test. Analyzing the times that seismic waves arrived at various measuring stations, one group calculated that the test occurred 2.2 kilometers west of the first blast. Another scientist found it only 1.8 kilometers away. The difference may not sound like a lot, Gibbons says, but it “is huge if you’re trying to place these relative locations within the terrain.” Move a couple of hundred meters to the east or west, and the explosion could have happened beneath a valley as opposed to a ridge — radically changing the depth estimates, along with estimates of the blast’s power.

Gibbons and colleagues think they may be able to reconcile these different location estimates. The answer lies in which station the seismic data come from. Studies that rely on data from stations within about 1,500 kilometers of Punggye-ri — as in eastern China — tend to estimate bigger distances between the locations of the five tests when compared with studies that use data from more distant seismic stations in Europe and elsewhere. Seismic waves must be leaving the test site in a more complicated way than scientists had thought, or else all the measurements would agree.

When Gibbons’ team corrected for the varying distances of the seismic data, the scientists came up with a distance of 1.9 kilometers between the 2006 and 2009 blasts. The team also pinpointed the other explosions as well. The September 2016 test turned out to be almost directly beneath the 2,205-meter summit of Mount Mantap, the group reported in January in Geophysical Journal International. That means the blast was, indeed, deeply buried and hence probably at least as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb for it to register as a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.

Other seismologists have been squeezing information out of the seismic data in a different way — not in how far the signals are from the test blast, but what they traveled through before being detected. Reiter and Seung-Hoon Yoo, also of Weston Geophysical, recently analyzed data from two seismic stations, one 370 kilometers to the north in China and the other 306 kilometers to the south in South Korea.

The scientists scrutinized the moments when the seismic waves arrived at the stations, in the first second of the initial P waves, and found slight differences between the wiggles recorded in China and South Korea, Reiter reported at the Denver conference. Those in the north showed a more energetic pulse rising from the wiggles in the first second; the southern seismic records did not. Reiter and Yoo think this pattern represents an imprint of the topography at Mount Mantap.

“One side of the mountain is much steeper,” Reiter explains. “The station in China was sampling the signal coming through the steep side of the mountain, while the southern station was seeing the more shallowly dipping face.” This difference may also help explain why data from seismic stations spanning the breadth of Japan show a slight difference from north to south. Those differences may reflect the changing topography as the seismic waves exited Mount Mantap during the test.

Four ways to verify a nuclear weapons test

Seismic: 170 stations worldwide monitor ground shaking to identify the location, strength and nature of a seismic event.

Hydroacoustic: 11 stations listen in the oceans, where sound waves can propagate far.

Infrasound: 60 stations detect low-frequency sound waves inaudible to humans.

Radionuclide: 80 stations sniff for radioactive particles dispersed in the wind after a test.

Learning from simulations

But there is only so much scientists can do to understand explosions they can’t get near. That’s where the test blasts in Nevada come in.

The tests were part of phase one of the Source Physics Experiment, a $40-million project run by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The goal was to set off a series of chemical explosions of different sizes and at different depths in the same borehole and then record the seismic signals on a battery of instruments. The detonations took place at the nuclear test site in southern Nevada, where between 1951 and 1992 the U.S. government set off 828 underground nuclear tests and 100 atmospheric ones, whose mushroom clouds were seen from Las Vegas, 100 kilometers away.

For the Source Physics Experiment, six chemical explosions were set off between 2011 and 2016, ranging up to 5,000 kilograms of TNT equivalent and down to 87 meters deep. The biggest required high-energy–density explosives packed into a cylinder nearly a meter across and 6.7 meters long, says Beth Dzenitis, an engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who oversaw part of the field campaign. Yet for all that firepower, the detonation barely registered on anything other than the instruments peppering the ground. “I wish I could tell you all these cool fireworks go off, but you don’t even know it’s happening,” she says.

The explosives were set inside granite rock, a material very similar to the granite at Mount Mantap. So the seismic waves racing outward behaved very much as they might at the North Korean nuclear test site, says William Walter, head of geophysical monitoring at Livermore. The underlying physics, describing how seismic energy travels through the ground, is virtually the same for both chemical and nuclear blasts.

Technicians lower an enormous canister of explosives into the ground in southern Nevada for a chemical explosion — part of the Source Physics Experiment series — to mimic the physics of nuclear blasts.

GARY STRIKER/LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LAB

The results revealed flaws in the models that researchers have been using for decades to describe how seismic waves travel outward from explosions. These models were developed to describe how the P waves compress rock as they propagate from large nuclear blasts like those set off starting in the 1950s by the United States and the Soviet Union. “That worked very well in the days when the tests were large,” Walter says. But for much smaller blasts, like those North Korea has been detonating, “the models didn’t work that well at all.”

Walter and Livermore colleague Sean Ford have started to develop new models that better capture the physics involved in small explosions. Those models should be able to describe the depth and energy release of North Korea’s tests more accurately, Walter reported at the Denver meeting.

A second phase of the Source Physics Experiment is set to begin next year at the test site, in a much more rubbly type of rock called alluvium. Scientists will use that series of tests to see how seismic waves are affected when they travel through fragmented rock as opposed to more coherent granite. That information could be useful if North Korea begins testing in another location, or if another country detonates an atomic bomb in fragmented rock.

For now, the world’s seismologists continue to watch and wait, to see what the North Korean government might do next. Some experts think the next nuclear test will come at a different location within Mount Mantap, to the south of the most recent tests. If so, that will provide a fresh challenge to the researchers waiting to unravel the story the seismic waves will tell.

“It’s a little creepy what we do,” Reiter admits. “We wait for these explosions to happen, and then we race each other to find the location, see how big it was, that kind of thing. But it has really given us a good look as to how [North Korea’s] nuclear program is progressing.” Useful information as the world’s nations decide what to do about North Korea’s rogue testing.

North Korea Kim Jung un, Cyber Theft of Currency

Posted on July 31, 2017July 31, 2017 by Denise Simon

Going back to the 1970’s, North Korea was counterfeiting U.S. currency. In 2006, it was the super note, a perfect $100 dollar bill.

Training for such skills as counterfeiting, illicit drugs, weapons, cyber warfare and bootleg merchandise comes out of Office 39. Clandestine and fraudulent transactions including management operations flowing through Office 39 is estimate in the $6-8 billion range.

In 2014, one defector fleeing to Russia had $5 million of the Office 39 funds money with him.

Those highly selected North Koreans assigned to Office 39 arrive from having received an education in these specialties from elite universities or academies in China and Russia. Other highly selected North Koreans are also required to attend an in country school known as Mirim College. This school was founded by Kim Jong Il in 1986.

According to a defector:

this college has a highly confidential mission—education of world-class IT warriors—its security is so exhaustively kept that individual guard units are dispatched to the college solely for security. The security manual distributed to guards indicates that, “Without the permission of the college commander, no car should be allowed entrance to college grounds except for that of Kim Jong Il.”

Students of the college wear the same uniform as military officials, but on their shoulders they brandish special stars, on which hak (meaning is learning) is printed. A “Kim Il Political Military University” badge is worn on the left side of the chest.

Kim Jung Il lived the high life while his own people suffered to not only beatings but to death by starvation. His son, Kim Jung Un, taking over the country lives much the same yet due to sanctions and isolation by the international community, illicit activities continue.

Counterfeiting of currency is not so much a common practice in North Korea and the country has been dabbling in bitcoin fraud and now through cyber activity, they steal currency.

Just recently, Reuters published an item referring to a report analyzed suspected cyber attacks between 2015 and 2017 on South Korean government and commercial institutions, identified another Lazarus spinoff named Andariel.

“Bluenoroff and Andariel share their common root, but they have different targets and motives,” the report said. “Andariel focuses on attacking South Korean businesses and government agencies using methods tailored for the country.”

Pyongyang has been stepping up its online hacking capabilities as one way of earning hard currency under the chokehold of international sanctions imposed to stop the development of its nuclear weapons program.

North Korea has cooperated with China, Russia and Iran to improve their cyber capabilities. China is especially complicit in that cooperation by providing the communications network inside the DPRK and inside China. Additionally, China has provided hardware, servers, routers. Russia is not without major blame and shares the guilt by dispatching Russian professors from Frunze Military Academy to train North Koreans to be professional hackers.

Additionally, Russia has sold to North Korea GPS jamming equipment in the area of sea navigation and also provides financial aid to North Korea supporting it’s abilities to interfere and disrupt command and control systems.

North Korea operates yet another location known as Office 91. It has four units:

110= Technology Reconnaissance Team for DDoS attacks

35= External Offensive Cyber Operations

121= Strictly assigned for cyber attacks on South Korea

204= Enemy Secret Cyber Psychological Warfare Unit

In total, it is estimated that North Korea has close to 10,000 people assigned the the cyber and hacking operations in country. Additionally, North Korea maintains a force of up to 1000 in China performing cyber warfare.

While it is common for headlines to refer to Kim Jung Un as a nutcase, that is hardly a fitting description for him. While he may be militant and spontaneous, he is well educated. He attended Liebefeld-Steinhölzli Schule, a Swiss state school gaining access to Western culture, but had lousy grades. He has two degrees, one in physics from Kim il Sung University and another as an Army officer obtained from the Kim Il Sung Military University.

He does maintain an asymmetrical military strategy that has astounded the West and countries in the region with his advanced missile systems and launch abilities. All this is funded by cyber theft of currency and information and cooperation with Iran, China and Russia. North Korea does have IP proxy locations for operations that include New Zealand, Malaysia, Indonesia an several others. The ‘darknet’ is full of countries co-opting servers and jump points all doing the same thing.

The Frunze Military Academy Panorama

The Military Spooling of Countries Due to N. Korea

Posted on July 30, 2017July 30, 2017 by Denise Simon

At present, there are 8 B-1B bombers at the Andersen AFB, Guam (6 from Dyess AFB). This includes in theater 192 conventional 1,200-km range JASSM-ER cruise missiles for as many aim points. In addition deployed are Tomahawk SLCMs on ships, SSNs, SSGNs.

At the UN, Nikki Haley said that China must now condemn North Korea for its repeated missile tests.

“China must decide whether it is finally willing to take this vital step,” she said.

“The time for talk is over. The danger the North Korean regime poses to international peace is now clear to all.”

Earlier on Saturday the US flew two supersonic bombers over the Korean Peninsula.

The B-1 bombers were escorted by South Korean fighter jets as they performed a low-pass over an air base near the South Korean capital of Seoul before returning to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.

Admiral Scott Swift of the Pacific fleets says he would launch a nuclear attack if ordered to do so.

Meanwhile: U.S.-South Korea Conduct Training in Response to North Korean Missile Launch

Eighth Army Public Affairs

HUMPHREYS GARRISON, Pyeongtaek, South Korea, July 28, 2017 — U.S. Eighth Army and South Korean army personnel today conducted a second combined training event to exercise assets in view of today’s North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile launch, Eighth Army officials here announced today.

This exercise once again utilized the Army Tactical Missile System and South Korea’s Hyunmoo Missile II, which fired missiles into territorial waters of South Korea along the country’s eastern coast July 5.

The ATACMS can be rapidly deployed and engaged and provides deep-strike precision capability, enabling the U.S.-South Korean alliance to engage a full array of time-critical targets under all weather conditions.

It is scheduled that one more operational test launch of an AFGSC Minuteman III IBM is slated for Aug. 2 – Aug. 4 from Vandenberg AFB.

WASHINGTON, July 30, 2017 — The Missile Defense Agency and soldiers of the 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade from Fort Bliss, Texas, conducted a successful missile defense test today using the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, according to a Missile Defense Agency news release.

A medium-range target ballistic missile was air-launched by an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III over the Pacific Ocean. The THAAD weapon system, located at Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska in Kodiak, detected, tracked and intercepted the target.

The test, designated Flight Experiment THAAD (FET)-01, was conducted to gather threat data from a THAAD interceptor in flight, the release said.

“In addition to successfully intercepting the target, the data collected will allow MDA to enhance the THAAD weapon system, our modeling and simulation capabilities, and our ability to stay ahead of the evolving threat,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Sam Greaves, Missile Defense Agency director.

Soldiers from the 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade conducted launcher, fire control and radar operations using the same procedures they would use in an actual combat scenario. Soldiers operating the equipment were not aware of the actual target launch time, the release said.

15th Successful Intercept

This was the 15th successful intercept in 15 tests for the THAAD weapon system.

The THAAD element provides a globally-transportable, rapidly-deployable capability to intercept ballistic missiles inside or outside the atmosphere during their final, or terminal, phase of flight. THAAD is strictly a defensive weapon system. The system uses hit-to-kill technology where kinetic energy destroys the incoming target, according to the release.

The mission of the Missile Defense Agency is to develop and deploy a layered ballistic missile defense system to defend the United States, its deployed forces, allies and friends from ballistic missile attacks of all ranges in all phases of flight, the release said.

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Additionally, the U.S. Delivered Two C-208B Aircraft to Philippine Air Force. They are ntelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. The delivery of the aircraft is part of a $33 million package through the U.S. National Defense Authorization Act Building Partnership Capacity Program to provide equipment and training to improve Philippine counterterrorism response capability. The Philippines has been fighting for months a terror group known as Abu Sayyaf.

Secret Service has Large Quiet Office in Hoover, Alabama

Posted on July 24, 2017July 24, 2017 by Denise Simon

Primer: The U.S. Secret Service maintains Electronic Crimes Task Forces, which focus on identifying and locating international cyber criminals connected to cyber intrusions, bank fraud, data breaches, and other computer-related crimes. The Secret Service’s Cyber Intelligence Section has directly contributed to the arrest of transnational cyber criminals responsible for the theft of hundreds of millions of credit card numbers and the loss of approximately $600 million to financial and retail institutions. The Secret Service also runs the National Computer Forensic Institute, which provides law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges with cyber training and information to combat cyber crime.

HOOVER, Ala. — The classrooms, tucked above a municipal court here in the Birmingham suburbs, are a long way from the White House. But walk through a set of secured doors and into the futuristic-looking work space, and you will find an important wager by the agency best known for protecting presidents, the Secret Service.

Only it has almost nothing to do with earpiece-wearing agents or armored cars.

Though the Secret Service may be better known for keeping government executives safe, it also has a mandate to investigate and fight financial and other cybercrimes. And in an era of overworked protection details and nonstop cybercrime, it could use some help.

So here at the National Computer Forensics Institute, the pupils are hardened police officers, prosecutors and, occasionally, a judge. Instruction mimics what the agency teaches its own special agents. And tuition is not only free, but the Secret Service throws in travel, room, board and, for police officers, tens of thousands of dollars of technology to set up their own forensics labs back home.

Data is extracted from mobile phones for use in a class on prosecution in Hoover. Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times

In exchange, the Secret Service has quietly empowered a network of thousands of law enforcement officers across the country capable of processing digital evidence and indebted to the agency that taught them.

“The threat nature has increased in the world, and the threats are all more and more integrated with the digital world,” said Ben Bass, the special agent in charge of the institute. “So assimilating that into what we do is really important.”

The institute opened in 2008 as a partnership between the Secret Service and the state of Alabama, which contributed space and money for its construction. At the time, few state and local law enforcement agencies had the capability to process digital evidence found on computers and cellphones, even as it was exploding in volume and importance. That left agencies heavily reliant on the Secret Service and the F.B.I. for processing and created a years long backlog in many cases.

The Secret Service reasoned that it would be critical to the future of its mission — not to mention the effectiveness of local and state law enforcement — to try to change that. The program remains the only one of its kind and scale in the country.

Though its protective mission occupies the public’s attention, the Secret Service has been investigating crimes since 1865, when President Lincoln saw the need to create a small force of investigators within the Treasury Department to combat counterfeit currency that was undermining American markets. That mandate has changed and widened in the decades since, along with threats to the country’s financial systems, and the agency now investigates bank fraud, credit card fraud, identity theft, child exploitation as well as counterfeiting.

It does so with a reasonably small force. The majority of the Secret Service’s 3,300 agents work out of field offices. The F.B.I., by comparison, has more than 13,000. To amplify its effect, the agency relies on dozens of electronic and financial crimes task forces across the country, where local and state law officers and people in academia and businesses work alongside its own agents.

The help has arrived at the right time for the agency, where in recent years low morale, high attrition and more people to protect in more places have conspired to pinch resources. Because protection is a nonnegotiable task, investigations often take the hit.

The effect can be significant. In the 2016 fiscal year, the agency spent 65 percent of its time on protection and 35 percent on investigative work, according to calculations it shared with members of the House Oversight Committee. That was an election year, when protection demands are highest. But it appears the ratio for this fiscal year — which only included the last month or so of the campaign — has not changed much, with 60 percent of time going to protection through the end of May. Typically it would be about 40 percent for a post-campaign fiscal year.

Robert Novy, the deputy assistant director for investigations, said the task forces help ensure that cases continue to move forward regardless of protection demands. He also said that they have begun to free the Secret Service’s own staff to focus on larger-scale cyberthreats and high-dollar financial crimes.

“By elevating their capacities and capabilities, it allows us to focus on finding ways to counter more significant financial threats,” Mr. Novy said.

Still, building the program has proved challenging. A decade after it first opened its doors, the institute trains about 1,100 people a year. But it is running at between 30 percent and 40 percent of capacity because of a shortage of federal funds. For some programs, would-be enrollees can wait as long as three years.

Its financial outlook remains uncertain. President Trump’s 2018 budget proposal zeroed out the program, though Randolph D. Alles, the agency’s new director, told lawmakers last month that he considered it “critical” to the agency and would move money from elsewhere in his budget to pay for it if need be. At the same time, lawmakers in the House and Senate have introduced legislation that could stabilize its funding.

A break room at the institute.

Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times

The institute’s finances appeared to be on few minds on a recent early summer day in Hoover, where a class of two dozen prosecutors sat in neat classroom rows, computers humming beside their feet, as data from the cellphone of a fictitious drug smuggler flashed onto their computer screens. The evidence was all there in ordered folders: call logs, texts, even compromising photographs of a would-be drug dealer, made visible by powerful software and a few patient instructors.

One room away and a few hours later, two dozen police officers packed into a wood-trimmed mock courtroom listened to another instructor hold forth from the witness stand on the ins and outs of being a good forensics witness. The key, he said, is balancing the use of technical details like “master boot records” and “disk partitions” with the bigger picture a less tech-savvy jury can more easily grasp.

“I need to be able to understand it so I can translate it when I go before a panel of 12 people,” said Jennifer Eugene, a prosecutor from New Jersey, describing her experience in front of a jury. “The law has not caught up with where the technology is.”

A five-week course for police on the basics of computer evidence recovery is the most popular, and graduates of the course leave here with $28,000 worth of technology and the ability to search seized computers for evidence of a crime. A similar course on mobile devices is growing in popularity. And more advanced courses cover network intrusion.

A classroom where a course on network intrusion is taught.

Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times

Prosecutors and judges can take shorter courses meant to familiarize them with digital evidence, which is still relatively new to many courtrooms.

But the mutual benefits of the program were on display, too. Frank Garibay, a detective with the San Antonio Police Department who had returned to the institute as a proctor after taking coursework himself, said his training here had transformed what his department could do.

It had also meant that when officials from the Texas Rangers and Homeland Security Investigations zeroed in on an illegal gambling ring in Texas, they could turn to the Secret Service’s San Antonio-based electronic crimes task force, including Mr. Garibay, for help.

The Secret Service paid for members of its task force to travel to the small South Texas town of Falfurrias for a weekend to set up a war room to process digital evidence.

The operation ended up taking down about a dozen illegal casinos, recovered almost $6 million, exposed drug and human trafficing rings, and ultimately public corruption.