Mr Choi has pleaded not guilty to seven charges, including for providing services for a weapons of mass destruction program and contravening UN and other sanctions.
On the second day of the trial on Thursday, the court heard from Steve Sin, a national security expert from the University of Maryland, who was stationed in South Korea from 2005-2010 before retiring from the United States Army as a major, and who specialises in terrorism, counter-terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and emerging technology.
Mr Sin told the court the notes seized from Mr Choi included terminology, calculations, diagrams and descriptions of various missiles and missile-related technology.
One of the calculations he described as relating to how far an object could travel, he said, was incorrect by a matter of 10 metres. “All the other ones would appear to be approximately correct,” he said. He described other notes as “technically correct”, though “in a simple form”.
He agreed with Mr Choi’s defence counsel, Robert Webb, that diagrams showing the function of gyroscopes and other guidance systems appeared to be a “high school or middle school” level.
Loading
But while he said it is “impossible to say for certain what the intention was” in Mr Choi’s note-taking, given “the types of info the person had written down, it is unlikely it was a hobby.”
He said another hand-drawn diagram appeared to be a rendering of the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago, with the letters ICBM (meaning inter-continental ballistic missile) circled and a line that “would seem to me the person is trying to indicate you can fly a missile into the island Japan”. He said the “central intent” of the page appeared to be showing “what the missiles can do”.
Mr Sin said Mr Choi’s alleged transactions coincided with “almost the peak era” of North Korea’s missile program. At this time the regime was in possession of short, medium, intermediate and inter-continental range missiles, which could be fitted with both conventional and unconventional warheads, including nuclear.
He said North Korea was also known to be supplying missiles to Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates.
