North Korea News: Country May Be Producing Own UMDH, Report Claims

North Korea may be producing its own unsymmetrical di-methyl-hydrazine (UDMH) for its missiles, reports claim.

According to the analysis of 38 North, North Korea may be producing its own UDMH, the highly volatile fuel that it used to import from Russia and China.

While the international sanction that bans the country from importing UDMH from its sources was thought to cripple its missile program, it is now believed that the sanction has an insignificant effect on North Korea in the event that reports claiming it is capable of producing its own powerful fuel are true, indeed.

"North Korea is hardly so backwards that UDMH production would come as a surprise. Over the years, a variety of liquid and solid rocket propellants have been found in seized cargoes from North Korea," said Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Non-proliferation programme at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California, whose research was one of the basis for 38 North's analysis report.

With the speculations on North Korea producing its own UDMH, supposedly dubbed as "Devil's Venom," it is now feared that the sanction on the communist country may be a little too late. After all, the very purpose of the sanction is to cripple the country's missile program as it already launched two long-range missiles this year, including the Hwasong-14 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which has a theoretical range that includes the mainland United States.

"If North Korea does not have UDMH, it cannot threaten the United States, it's as simple as that. These are the issues that the U.S. intelligence community has to answer: from which countries they receive the fuel — it's probably China — and whether North Korea has a stockpile and how big it is," Sen. Edward J. Markey, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the New York Times in an interview last month.