Missiles

Photo of Scud Missile taken by Burmese officers on a visit to North korea

Burma is pursuing a least two ways to produce missiles.

One path, is through Defence Industry factories which they have placed throughout the country.  These factories are purchased from North Korea and some of them are solely for the purpose of  building missiles.

The other path is a more self reliant path.  Perhaps because of the increasing scrutiny over North Korean shipments to Burma, or perhaps simply because they don’t want to have to rely on anyone but themselves, Burma is trying to gain the knowledge to manufacture missiles independantly.   To do this they have sent a number of people to be trained in rocket engineering in Russia… one of whom was Sai.

In the Factory at Myaing, Sai created a prototype of an impeller for a rocket engine.

We showed this analysis to Geoff Forden from MIT and he was able to calcultate the size of the engine and the potential range of the missile:

“The impeller that we are seeing in this picture is about twice the diameter of the impeller for a SCUD and that directly relates to how much fuel it pumps through in a given minute or something. And you can imagine it having the thrust of what is called a Nodong engine which is the larger missiles that North Korea sold to Iran and Pakistan and Syria.  And they have ranges of typically about 1000 km.”

Read Geoff’s full report on our material on Armscontrolwonk here: