北韓武器正在殺害烏克蘭人。意義深遠 (1/2)

Recently Yahoo News on-line reported the following:

North Korean weapons are killing Ukrainians. The implications are far bigger (1/2)

 BBC Jean Mackenzie - Seoul correspondent

Sun, May 5, 2024 at 1:49 a.m. PDT·9 min read

On 2 January, a young Ukrainian weapons inspector, Khrystyna Kimachuk, got word that an unusual-looking missile had crashed into a building in the city of Kharkiv. She began calling her contacts in the Ukrainian military, desperate to get her hands on it. Within a week, she had the mangled debris splayed out in front of her at a secure location in the capital Kyiv.

She began taking it apart and photographing every piece, including the screws and computer chips smaller than her fingernails. She could tell almost immediately this was not a Russian missile, but her challenge was to prove it.

Buried amidst the mess of metal and spouting wires, Ms Kimachuk spotted a tiny character from the Korean alphabet. Then she came across a more telling detail. The number 112 had been stamped onto parts of the shell. This corresponds to the year 2023 in the North Korean calendar. She realised she was looking at the first piece of hard evidence that North Korean weapons were being used to attack her country.

"We'd heard they had delivered some weapons to Russia, but I could see it, touch it, investigate it, in a way no-one had been able to do before. This was very exciting", she told me over the phone from Kyiv.

Since then, the Ukrainian military says dozens of North Korean missiles have been fired by Russia into its territory. They have killed at least 24 people and injured more than 70.

For all the recent talk of Kim Jong Un preparing to start a nuclear war, the more immediate threat is now North Korea's ability to fuel existing wars and feed global instability.

Ms Kimachuk works for Conflict Armament Research (CAR), an organisation that retrieves weapons used in war, to work out how they were made. But it wasn't until after she had finished photographing the wreckage of the missile and her team analysed its hundreds of components, that the most jaw-dropping revelation came.

It was bursting with the latest foreign technology. Most of the electronic parts had been manufactured in the US and Europe over the past few years. There was even a US computer chip made as recently as March 2023. This meant that North Korea had illicitly procured vital weapons components, snuck them into the country, assembled the missile, and shipped it to Russia in secret, where it had then been transported to the frontline and fired - all in a matter of months.

"This was the biggest surprise, that despite being under severe sanctions for almost two decades, North Korea is still managing to get its hands on all it needs to make its weapons, and with extraordinary speed," said Damien Spleeters, the deputy director at CAR.

Over in London, Joseph Byrne, a North Korea expert at the defence think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), was equally stunned.

"I never thought I would see North Korean ballistic missiles being used to kill people on European soil," he said. He and his team at RUSI have been tracking the shipment of North Korean weapons to Russia ever since Mr Kim met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Russia in September of last year to strike a suspected arms deal.

Using satellite imagery, they have been able to observe four Russian cargo ships shuttling back and forth between North Korea and a Russian military port, loaded with hundreds of containers at a time.

In total RUSI estimates 7,000 containers have been sent, filled with more than a million ammunition shells and grad rockets - the sort that can be fired out of trucks in large volleys. Their assessments are backed up by intelligence from the US, UK and South Korea, though Russia and North Korea have denied the trade.

"These shells and rockets are some of the most sought-after things in the world today and are allowing Russia to keep pounding Ukrainian cities at a time when the US and Europe have been faltering over what weapons to contribute," Mr Byrne said.

Buying and firing

But it is the arrival of ballistic missiles on the battlefield that has concerned Mr Byrne and his colleagues the most, because of what they reveal about North Korea's weapons programme.

Since the 1980s North Korea has sold its weapons abroad, largely to countries in the North Africa and the Middle East, including Libya, Syria and Iran. They have tended to be old, Soviet-style missiles with a poor reputation. There is evidence that Hamas fighters likely used some of Pyongyang's old rocket-propelled grenades in their attack last 7 October.

But the missile fired on 2 January, that Ms Kimachuk took apart, was seemingly Pyongyang's most sophisticated short-range missile - the Hwasong 11 - capable of travelling up to 700km (435 miles).

Although the Ukrainians have downplayed their accuracy, Dr Jeffrey Lewis, an expert in North Korean weapons and non-proliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, says they appear to be not much worse than the Russian missiles.

The advantage of these missiles is that they are extremely cheap, explained Dr Lewis. This means you can buy more and fire more, in the hope of overwhelming air defences, which is exactly what the Russians appear to be doing.

This then raises the question of how many of these missiles the North Koreans can produce. The South Korean government recently observed North Korea has sent 6,700 containers of munitions to Russia, it says that Pyongyang's weapons factories were operating at full-tilt, and Dr Lewis, who has been studying these factories through satellites, reckons they can churn out a few hundred a year.

Still reeling from their discovery, Mr Spleeters and his team are now trying to work out how this is possible, given that companies are banned from selling parts to North Korea.

Many of the computer chips that are integral to modern weapons, that guide them through the air to their intended targets, are the same chips that are used to power our phones, washing machines and cars, Mr Spleeters explained.

These are being sold all over the world in staggering numbers. Manufacturers sell to distributors in their billions, who sell them on in their millions, meaning they often have no idea where their products end up.

(to be continued)

Translation

1 月 2 日，一名年輕的烏克蘭武器檢查員 Khrystyna Kimachuk 獲悉，一枚看起來不尋常的導彈墜入了哈爾科夫市的一座建築物。 她開始給烏克蘭軍方的聯絡人打電話，迫切地想得到它。 一週之內，在首都基輔的一個安全地點, 殘破的碎片在她面前攤開出來。

她開始把它拆開並拍攝每一個部件，包括比她指甲還小的螺絲和電腦晶片。 她幾乎立刻就能看出這不是俄羅斯飛彈，但她面臨的挑戰是證明這一點。

Kimachuk 女士埋在一堆金屬和湧出的電線中，發現了韓文字中的一個細小字母。 然後她發現了一個更能說明問題的細節。 外殼的部分部位印有數字 112。 這相當於朝鮮曆法的 2023 年。 她意識到她正在尋找北韓武器被用來攻擊她的國家的第一個確鑿證據。

她在來自基輔的電話告訴我: “我們都有聽說他們向俄羅斯運送了一些武器，但我可以看到它、觸摸它、調查它，這是一種前人沒有能夠做到的方式。這非常令人興奮” 。

此後，烏克蘭軍方表示，俄羅斯已向烏克蘭境內發射了數十枚北韓飛彈。 他們已造成至少 24 人死亡、70 多人受傷。

儘管最近有很多關於金正恩準備發動核戰的言論，但現在更直接的威脅是北韓助長現有戰爭, 和加劇全球不穩定的能力。

Kimachuk 女士在衝突軍備研究 (CAR) 工作，該組織負責回收戰爭中使用的武器，以查明這些武器的製造方式。 但直到她拍攝完導彈殘骸,而她的團隊分析了導彈的數百個部件後，最令人瞠目結舌的發現才出現。

它充满最新的外國技術。大多數電子零件都在在前幾年在美國同歐洲製造。 甚至有在2023年3月才生產出的美國電腦芯片。 意味着朝鮮非法採購重要的武器部件，把它們偷偷運回到該国，組裝導彈，然後秘密運往俄羅斯，然後從那處被運送到前線並發射 - 所有都是在幾個月內完成。

CAR 的副主任 Damien Spleeters 說: 「這是最大的出奇，儘管近二十年來一直受到嚴厲制裁，北韓仍然設法以驚人的速度獲得製造武器所需的一切」。

在倫敦，國防智庫皇家聯合軍種研究所 (RUSI) 的北韓問題專家 Joseph Byrne 同樣感到震驚。

他說: 「我從未想過會看到北韓彈道飛彈被用來在歐洲土地上殺人」。 自去年 9 月金正恩在俄羅斯會見俄羅斯總統普京, 並達成一項可疑的武器交易以來，他和他的 RUSI 團隊一直在追蹤北韓武器運往俄羅斯的情況。

利用衛星影像，他們能夠觀察到四艘俄羅斯貨船在北韓和俄羅斯軍港之間來回穿梭，每次裝載數百個貨櫃。

RUSI 估計總共發送了 7,000 個貨櫃，裡面裝滿了超過 100 萬枚彈藥和級火箭 - 可以從卡車上進行大規模齊射的那種。 他們的評估得到了美國、英國和韓國情報的支持，儘管俄羅斯和北韓否認了這項貿易。

Byrne表示： “這些砲彈和火​​箭是當今世界上最受歡迎的東西，在美國和歐洲一直在猶豫要提供什麼武器的時候，俄羅斯可以繼續襲擊烏克蘭城市。”

購買和發射

但最讓Byrne先生和他的同事們擔憂的是彈道飛彈抵達戰場的事實，因為他們揭露了北韓的武器計劃。

自 1980 年代以來，北韓已向國外出售武器，主要銷往北非和中東國家，包括利比亞、敘利亞和伊朗。 它們往往是老式的蘇聯式飛彈，聲譽不佳。 有證據表明，哈馬斯武裝分子在去年 10 月 7 日的襲擊中可能使用了平壤的一些舊火箭推進式手榴彈。

但 Kimachuk 女士拆解的 1 月 2 日發射的飛彈似乎是平壤最先進的短程飛彈 - 火星 11 - 射程可達 700 公里（435 英里）。

儘管烏克蘭人對飛彈的準確性不放在心，但 Middlebury 國際研究學院北韓武器和防擴散專家Jeffrey Lewis 博士表示，它們似乎不並比俄羅斯的飛彈更差劣。

Lewis 博士解釋說，這些飛彈的優點是極其便宜。 這意味著你可以購買更多並發射更多，以期壓倒防空系統，而這似乎是俄羅斯人正在做的事情。

這就引出了北韓能夠生產多少飛彈的問題。 南韓政府最近觀察到北韓已向俄羅斯運送了6,700個貨櫃的彈藥，並稱平壤的武器工廠正在全速運作，Lewis博士一直透過衛星研究這些工廠，認為他們一年可以生產幾百個貨櫃。

Spleeters與他的團隊對發現感到震驚，仍然試圖弄清楚這怎可能發生，因為公司是被禁止向北韓出售零件。

Spleeters先生解釋說，許多現代武器不可或缺的電腦晶片, 即用以引導武器在空中到達預定目標那種, 是與為我們的手機、洗衣機和汽車提供動力的晶片相同。

這些產品銷往世界各地，數量驚人。 製造商以數十億美元的價格賣給分銷商，分銷商又以數百萬美元的價格出售它，這意味著他們常常不知道自己的產品最終去了哪裡。

（待續）