Pakistani missiles are all North Korean missiles painted in Green, to give a Islamic flavor and named after Islamic conquerers who invaded India.Why do so many Pakistanis dont believe this?
By Alex Copulsky
Very few Pakistanis realize that the missiles paraded through the streets of Pakistan were actually designed in North Korea and based on Russian models. The rest of the international community, however, is fully aware. For much of the past half-century, North Korea has been producing ballistic missiles for export to a wide range of buyers, a situation that ended in October 2006 when a North Korean nuclear test finally prompted the UN to levy an arms embargo, which forbade North Korea from buying or selling arms. These embargoes merit a closer look at North Korea’s export trade, which reveals strong economic motivations often masked by Kim Jong-Il’s struggle for geopolitical survival.
A Tale of Two Weapons Systems
North Korea’s state-run economy produces almost nothing of export value, with one exception: armaments. They first started selling arms back in the 1960s, knockoffs of Chinese knockoffs of Russian guns. North Korean arms soon acquired a reputation as cheap and reliable, and by the mid-1980s, North Korea was doing half of their export trade in conventional arms. Eventually, even cheaper producers in other underdeveloped countries forced the Koreans off the market. But by then, they had found an even better sale: ballistic missiles.
North Korea first acquired the designs for Scud series artillery missiles around 1983, and by 1987 it was producing export-quality versions. Gary Samore, former Director for Non-Proliferation of the National Security Council, told HPR that “the Iran-Iraq War was North Korea’s first big break into the market”. North Korea sold huge numbers of Scuds to Iran to use against Iraq’s Russian Scuds, and then started producing its biggest missile success to date, the Nodong.
"Nodongs were cheap, reliable, and low-tech; a “clear scale-up of Scud ideas,” said Samore. It is a medium-range missile with a range of 1000-1300 km that initially sold lucratively to Iran and Syria. After the North Koreans found out about the Pakistani nuclear program, and saw the potential for synergy, the missile was sold to the Pakistanis for nuclear designs and information, and is currently the only credible missile threat in Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
Economic Crunch
North Korea is emphatically not a Soviet-style arms exporter, trying to buy less powerful nations’ hearts with dump-priced guns. Kim Jong-Il’s government takes American dollars for their guns, and in fact demands them. This should be a clear sign that, as Samore told HPR, with the exception of the Pakistan deal, “North Korea’s motivations in missile sales are wholly and completely economic”. And even in the case of Pakistan, North Korea used arms to buy technology that its meager cash supply almost certainly couldn’t afford.
As has been the case for many Stalinistic economies, North Korea is afflicted by both low exports and high imports, especially of Chinese grain. As a result, North Korea runs huge current-account deficits (currently around $1 billion, with $2.5 billion/year of imports), and simply cannot provide necessary foreign exchange. Arms sales were one of the ways that North Koreans got the dollars with which to buy the grain and machinery needed to feed their citizens. At the height of its arms sales, in 2001, North Korea brought in roughly $600 million in missile sales to the Middle East alone.
A Changing International Environment
Since then, the market has turned against North Korea. First of all, the United States has applied intense diplomatic pressure against its allies to give up North Korean arms, closing both Saudi and Egyptian markets (among others). In addition, the same process that forced North Korea out of conventional arms has taken hold once more; Iranian and Syrian copies of Chinese missiles have proven cheaper than North Korean copies of Russian models. As a result, export sales had become negligible even before the arms embargo of 2006. North Korean efforts to provide hard currency have recently turned to drug dealing and counterfeiting, which, unfortunately, stand as a last defense against starvation for many of North Korea’s citizens.
http://hprsite.squarespace.com/death-of-a-salesman-042007/
The arms export issue reveals that in the “Hermit Kingdom,” no issue can be solved in isolation. Political and economic motives are entangled so deeply that they reach the roots of the state itself. However, recent developments may reflect a growing awareness of that fact. The international community has begun to move away from strictly punitive measures like arms sanctions and toward towards carrot-and-stick deals like the nuclear bargain of February 2007. This is a move that should be toasted by all, North Koreans and outsiders alike.
