SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A handful of Malaysian citizens have been barred from leaving North Korea as relations between the two countries continue to deteriorate:
North Korea barred Malaysians from leaving the country on Tuesday, sparking tit-for-tat action by Malaysia, as police investigating the murder of Kim Jong Nam in Kuala Lumpur sought to question three men hiding in the North Korean embassy. Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak accused North Korea of "effectively holding our citizens hostage" and held an emergency meeting of his National Security Council. The United Nations called for calm between Malaysia and North Korea and urged them to settle their differences through "established diplomatic practice."
The moves underscored the dramatic deterioration in ties with one of North Korea's few friends outside China since the murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's estranged half-brother at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Feb. 13. Malaysia said the assassins used VX nerve agent, a chemical listed by the United Nations as a weapon of mass destruction.
[...] There are 11 Malaysians in North Korea, according to a Malaysian foreign ministry official, including three embassy staff, six family members, and two others.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 09 2017, @03:46PM
Building a rocket involves a pretty deep manufacturing and tooling chain, which seems to be a contradiction.
It's doesn't actually require that. For example, I've helped build small sounding rockets with a potential payload of 5-10 kg in someone's garage. If we were to treat that as a weapon platform, it would be unguided with an effective range of several miles. If I were to attempt to scale up from that to a larger range and payload, I would need more stuff, but stuff that could readily be supplied by North Korea.
Historically, we have several examples of significant rocket production under hard circumstances and with virtually all construction in one place (eliminating the need for deep supply chains). First, there is the V-2 rocket [wikipedia.org] of the Second World War. While it was integrated into Nazi Germany's logistics system and used extensive slave labor, the entire construction of the rocket happened inside an old gypsum mine and produced over 5000 such rockets over the course of the war. And most tool and manufacturing development happened either there or at the earlier V-2 testing center.
Another example is the Qassam rocket [wikipedia.org] built in the Gaza strip first in 2001 and used heavily between 2003-2009. The last model had a range of 16 km and a payload of 20 kg. These were apparently all assembled in hidden machine shops due to the ongoing conflict with Israel.
While North Korea's program doesn't match any of these (particularly, the orbit-capable rocket which needs some more serious engineering), it remains that building rockets requires surprisingly little external infrastructure. You need to have access to machine shop tools and materials of sufficient quality, but that's it for the technology side. North Korea has plenty of real estate for building and launching. Guidance systems and other avionics can be an issue, but rudimentary ones can be built easily, and it would be trivial to smuggle in some of the hobby controller systems (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc) from China. Those would be adequate.
So while rockets in most of the world (US, Russia, Europe, China, etc) tend to have extensive supply chains, we have a number of historical examples where rockets are assembled nearly from scratch under difficult logistics environments. North Korea is merely another example of the latter.