North Korean nukes look like disco balls, olives, and peanuts, according to a group of scientists and researchers who study nuclear weapons. Newly released research puts the DPRK’s devastating stockpile of quirkily named nightmare machines at around 50. And it could get that number up to 130 by the end of the decade.
The world’s nuclear powers are cagey about the exact nature of their nukes. It’s a weapon you want everyone to know you have, but you don’t necessarily want them to know how many.
Enter the Federation of American Scientists [FAS], a U.S. nonprofit that attempts to use science to make the world a better place. One of its big projects is the Nuclear Notebook, a constantly updating list of the world’s nuclear weapons. Cataloging world-ending weapons is a challenge in countries like France and the U.S. which have certain amounts of transparency around their arsenals. In North Korea, it’s almost impossible. Almost.
North Korea was not always as closed as it is now. International officials did once visit the country and knowledge from those visits gave the FAS critical information that it used to suss out what, exactly, the DPRK is capable of. North Korea also does a lot of media events that create pictures and videos that help experts figure out the size of its arsenal. Kim Jong-un loves to pose with nukes and launchers in parades.
“Using these resources and other open sources, including commercial satellite imagery and publicly available reports from the [International Atomic Energy Agency] and the UN Panel of Experts on North Korea, analysts at independent organizations have been able to examine industry networks, locate key facilities, and map North Korea’s nuclear fuel cycle to generate estimates of fissile material stockpiles and production—all of which are key factors in assessing the size, sophistication, and status of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal today,” the FAS said in its latest nuclear notebook.
In its research, the FAS identified three kinds of North Korean warheads which it gave nicknames. There’s the disco ball, which the DPRK first showed off in 2016. Supposedly, this is a single-stage implosion nuke. Basically, it’s a big silver ball with a bit of nuclear material surrounded by high explosives. The implosion of the high explosives would trigger the nuclear explosion. This is similar to the nuclear device detonated at the Trinity site in Oppenheimer.
In 2017, Kim Jong Un posed with what the FAS dubbed the peanut. This is supposedly a two-stage thermonuclear device. A thermonuclear device consists of a series of nuclear explosions that feed off each other and generate a massive blast. FAS said in its report that the peanut might not be a thermonuclear weapon at all, however. This could be a device filled with tritium, which would improve the efficiency of a single-stage device.
In 2023, the DPRK unveiled photos of what the FAS called the olive. The small warhead appeared to be a single-stage nuke similar to the disco ball but designed to fit inside a variety of delivery systems. “North Korea’s display of different devices demonstrates an aspirational progression toward more sophisticated and efficient warhead design,” the FAS said in its research.
Based on the available knowledge, FAS also tried to guess how much nuclear material North Korea has. It then used that number to extrapolate the number of nukes it’s sitting on. “We estimate North Korea could possess up to 81 kilograms of plutonium and 1,800 kilograms of [highly-enriched uranium], which could supply North Korea with enough material to potentially build up to 90 nuclear weapons,” it said.
Its estimates were conservative. “These lower-end projections mean that North Korea could potentially build up to 20 uranium-only design and 33 composite design weapons if using the same fissile material allocations, for a possible capacity to build up to 53 nuclear weapons,” it said. The FAS estimated that the DPRK could build around 6 nukes a year and bring its numbers up to 130 by the end of the decade.
Buried in the report’s scientific research is something more troubling than the nukes themselves: a discussion of how North Korea plans to use them. Some, but not all, countries with nukes maintain something called a “no-first-use policy.” It’s a codified promise that they’ll only use their nukes if someone else attacks them with nukes first. China has a no-first-use policy. The United States and Russia do not.
North Korea once promised it would never use nuclear weapons preemptively, but it’s changed its mind. According to the FAS report, North Korea’s parliament passed a law giving it the right to launch nukes preemptively in 2022. One year later, the North Korean government codified under the country’s constitution its right to ‘deter war and protect regional and global peace by rapidly developing nuclear weapons to a higher level.’
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