Seized missile radars on N. Korean ship a threat to aircraft

Seized missile radars on N. Korean ship a threat to aircraft
Oren Dorell, @OrenDorell, USA TODAY 8:08 p.m. EDT July 16, 2013

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Panama: North Korean-flagged ship had ballistic missiles and other arms
Panama says it seized the ship as it set sail from Cuba
Ship's captain suffered heart attack, tried to commit suicide,
Panamanian president says

Missile radar systems discovered aboard a North Korean-flagged ship that
had last been in Cuba could be upgraded to make air-defense systems more
effective at shooting down modern military aircraft, military analysts
said Tuesday.

The North Korean ship was seized after inspectors found weapons system
parts under sacks of sugar as it sought to cross the Panama Canal on its
way to its home country, Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli said
Tuesday. North Korea is under a United Nations arms embargo.

Patrick Ventrell, a State Department spokesman, said the department's
non-proliferation bureau is looking into the case. "Any shipment of arms
or related materiel would violate numerous U.N. Security Council
resolutions," he said.

Defense experts said images released by Panama indicate the cargo is a
radar system for the SA-2 family of surface-to-air (SAM) missiles, which
are designed to shoot down enemy aircraft at high elevations.

John Pike of Globalsecurity.org said that ever since an SA-2 shot down
Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane in 1960, American engineers have worked "to
render this missile ineffective."

"I think the United States and South Korea and Japan have reasonable
confidence they can jam it and blow up its radars and it can be rendered
ineffective, but it could not be ignored," said Pike, whose group
monitors weapons threats globally.

Panama had not verified where the radar system came from or where it was
headed ultimately. Cuba and North Korea issued no statement on the
discovery.

The radar was developed by the former Soviet Union, which was dissolved
in 1991, but the system is "still in use in a lot of countries, and
progressive upgrades to the radars and the missiles means it is not
completely useless," said James Hardy, Asia-Pacific editor of IHS Jane's
Defense Weekly.

Modern jamming techniques prevent such a radar from getting a fix on an
aircraft but "counter-counter-electronic measures have been fitted to
later, post-Soviet models of this radar," Hardy said.

Modernizing the radars would involve changing analog systems to digital
and upgrading the software to make them less vulnerable to electronic
jamming and spoofing, according to IHS Jane's.

Martinelli said the ship that was transporting the cargo is the Chong
Chon Gang. The crew resisted efforts to search and seize the ship, and
the captain had a heart attack and attempted suicide during the
operation, Martinelli said.

The equipment could have been sent from Cuba to North Korea for an
upgrade, to be returned to Cuba and to be paid for with the sugar, or it
could be an arms shipment to North Korea, IHS Jane's said.

Bruce Bechtol, a former intelligence analyst for the Defense
Intelligence Agency, said the seizure uncovered the first confirmed
shipment of weaponry from Cuba to North Korea since the end of the Cold War.

Although North Korea already has many SA-2 missiles, "you can always use
more," said Bechtol, author of The Last Days of Kim Jong-il: The North
Korean Threat in a Changing Era. The SA-2s "shoot down fighter aircraft
quite effectively," Bechtol said.

Contributing: The Associated Press

Source: "Seized missile radars on N. Korean ship a threat to aircraft" -
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/07/16/panama-north-korean-ship/2520109/