______________ Did Ukraine Arm North Korea? --TIME* _______________ Did the US Try to Cover It Up?

By

        Phillip Todd

      Over the past eight months, North Korea has tested launched three rockets capable of striking the U.S. mainland. According to missile experts in the U.S. and Europe the key components of these rockets are based on Soviet designs, much like those displayed in the museum in Ukraine. Michael Elleman is a former U.N. Weapons inspector and consultant to the Pentagon. At his think tank in London, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Elleman compared footage of North Korean launches with photos of Soviet missile engines from the 1960's and they appeared to match the RD-250, an outdated but highly reliable machine. Roughly 200 of these engines still exist, according to Yuzhmash, the missile factory in Dnipro, Ukraine that made them. Elleman concluded that if one had been stolen, it would more likely not have been from Russia, but from the smaller stockpile in Ukraine.

      Founded during WWII to help the Red Army defeat the Nazis, it went on to develop many of the Soviet Union's most powerful ballistic missiles. Yuzhmash operated initially as "plant 586" and was capable of producing of up to 120 ICBM's a year. After the breakup of the Soviet Union the plant was an obvious target for espionage. Under pressure from the U.S. and Russia, Ukraine agreed in 1994 to give up the arsenal of nuclear warheads it had inherited from the Soviet Union. It also pledged to disarm the ballistic missiles meant to carry those warheads.

    For the cause of global disarmament, this was a break through. Four Yuzhmash, it was a disaster. Thousands of its engineers lost their jobs as the state's demand for missiles dried up. By U.S. estimates, tens of thousands of them were left jobless after the Soviet union fell apart. “There were huge temptations for scientists to take some of their knowledge and potentially sell it elsewhere,” says former U. S. ambassador to Ukraine, Carlos Pasqual.

     Yuri Simvolokov, a union organizer who has helped Yuzhmash workers staged strikes over unpaid wages, says many of them have gone abroad to find work over the years-not just to North Korea, but also to Iran and Pakistan. “They pay big money over there,” he says of these countries, over dinner with a few of his fellow teamsters. “And if they want to build a rocket, they bring our specialists over. It's nothing new.”

      Starting in the early 1990's, the North Korean military methodically sought to assemble its weapons program from the ruins of the Soviet missile industry. In April 1991, as the Soviet Union was dissolving, a specialist in solid state physics named Anatoly Rubstov was approached by a group of North Koreans at an academic conference in Beijing. The North Korean offer, compared with his prospects back home, most of seemed like saving grace. As he later explained it interviews with Russian and western reporters, he was invited to set up a research institute in North Korea and staff it with Russian engineers. Their aim would be to establish the regime's missile program, according to his own published accounts. But it didn't stay secret for long. On October 15, 1992, about 60 of his recruits were detained at a Moscow Airport, and news of their plans caused an international scandal. Under the pressure from the U.S. and South Korea, the Kremlin agreed to prevent Russian scientists from working on the North Korean missile program.

      How do you stop starving rocket scientists and engineers from selling their knowledge to others? The U.S. and Europe in 1993, set up two organizations, one based in Moscow and the other in Kiev (The Science and Technology Center – Ukraine) with the aim of giving tax free grants to scientists in Russia, Ukraine, and other formerly Communist nations. It was a handout to keep the scientists from selling their knowledge abroad. It still functions today but on a shoe string budget as Western funds have dried up. It has been estimated between 15,000 and 20,000 experts in weapons of mass destruction were left jobless in Ukraine alone after the fall of the Soviet Union.

      As early as 1991, and as recently as 2011, North Koreans were caught trying to acquire Soviet-era missile technology, which has not always been kept under lock and key. As an example as recent as the winter of 2011, two bloggers found a way to sneak into one of Moscow's most secretive missile factories, ENERGOMASH, and spent several nights photographing its technology. They did not encounter a single security guard. Although highly embarrassing for Russia's missile industry, the incident did not make many headlines in the West, where terrorism and wars in the Middle East and eclipsed other security concerns.

      A small team of disgruntled employees are underpaid guards could be enticed to steal a few dozen engines like RD-250, Elleman wrote in a report that was published in August. These machines, he added, could have been flown or, more likely, transported by train through Russia to North Korea without discovery. 'Russia at that time was a total mess, he says nobody had any money.” The borders were open. How lax was security? In 2002, six tons of components for a Soviet ballistic missile turned up in a Ukrainian scrap yard!

       In the early 2000's, well before North Korea would test its first new nuclear bomb in 2006, Viktor Moisa, a retired rocket scientist, welcomed the North Koreans to his institute in Eastern Ukraine just as you would with any other guests. The visitors interest in missile technology did not arouse his suspicion. “They came as tourists at least that's how they presented themselves.” He took them upstairs to the showroom of Soviet satellites and rocket engines, the pride of the institute's collection. They then went out to the yard to view an array of parts for ballistic missiles were on display.

      At Yuzhmash the old missile components are still on display there. Guidance systems, fuel pumps and the massive cones designed to hold new nuclear warheads at the tip of the rocket are still in inventory. He pointed to a rocket that had been in the same spot for over two decades, exposed to the elements, yet it had no evidence of corrosion or other damage. “That was the quality of what we made back then,” Moisa said proudly. That seemed clear from North Korea's latest missile launches. Experts in chemical, nuclear, and biological arms, are not hard to find in Ukraine. North Korean spies posing as tourists were arrested in Ukraine in 2011 while trying to purchase copies of the factories designs, both are now serving eight years in prison for espionage.

      Pyongyang's weapons program had help from a variety of sources. In preparing its latest report to the security council, the U.N. panel sent inquiries to Russian officials, asking for the names and passport numbers of any weapons scientists who might have passed through Russia on their way to North Korea. The regime's ability to enrich uranium, a key step in building new nuclear warhead, is believed to have come from Pakistan. But launching those warheads across continents would be impossible without Russian or Ukrainian Technology, experts have concluded.

      That brings us to the question – Was the timing of the U.S. funded coup in Ukraine a direct response to North Korea's launching of missles over Japan earlier in the year? Did the intelligence community trace these missile engines and designs back the factory in Ukraine and was a major factor in pushing the elected leadership out establishing a puppet regime to cover it up?

      There were other motives to the coup as we at The American Constitutionalist have revealed in past articles but we have to be a bit suspicious as to why Time magazine would publish this story. The plans of the elite are usually not readily apparent. This is a story that is still unfolding. We will keep you informed.

*Excerpted from Time magazine