VIII. North Korean nuclear forces

306 MILITARY SPENDING AND ARMAMENTS, 2022 VIII. North Korean nuclear forces HANS M. KRISTENSEN AND MATT KORDA* The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) maintains an active but highly opaque nuclear weapon programme. SIPRI estimates that, as of January 2023, North Korea possessed around 30 nuclear weapons (see table 7.9, end of section), but that it probably possessed sufficient fissile material for an approximate total of 50–70 nuclear devices, depending on warhead design. These estimates are based on calculations of the amount of fissile material—plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU)—that North Korea is believed to have produced for use in nuclear weapons (see section X), its nuclear weapon testing history and its observable missile forces. Analysing the numbers and types of North Korean warheads and delivery vehicles is fraught with uncertainty due to limited and untrustworthy public sources. Most of the data presented here is derived from sources outside North Korea, including satellite imagery, United States government reports and statements (which may also be biased), and expert analyses.1 North Korea has conducted a total of six nuclear explosive tests: in 2006, 2009, 2013, twice in 2016, and most recently 2017.2 In January 2020 the North Korean government announced that it would no longer observe the moratorium on conducting nuclear explosive tests or flight tests of intermediate-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles that it imposed upon itself in 2018.3 It actually ended the moratorium in 2022 by launching a Hwasong-12 (KN17) intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM).4 This publicly acknowledged long-range ballistic missile launch was part of an unprecedentedly busy year of missile testing for North Korea: it conducted more than 90 tests of short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs), medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs), land-attack cruise missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), IRBMs and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). In addition, in January 2021 the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, announced that North Korea had been able to develop tactical (i.e. 1 Kristensen, H. M. and Korda, M., ‘Estimating world nuclear forces: An overview and assessment of sources’, SIPRI Commentary, 14 June 2021. 2 Fedchencko, V., ‘Nuclear explosions, 1945–2017’, SIPRI Yearbook 2018. 3 Nebehay, S., ‘North Korea abandons nuclear freeze pledge, blames “brutal” US sanctions’, Reuters, 21 Jan. 2020. 4 For the missiles and submarines discussed in this section, a designation in parentheses (e.g. KN17 in this case) following the North Korean designation (e.g. Hwasong-12) is the designation assigned by the US Department of Defense. * The authors wish to thank Eliana Johns for contributing invaluable research to this publication.