ONN Senior Analyst Tianran Xu re-examines North Korea’s nuclear testing history and suggests some tests may have used more advanced designs than previously assessed.
Read the first three paragraphs:
Aside from wide-ranging yield estimates and rare escapees’ accounts, North Korean (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK) state media reports and statements are the primary sources available for interpreting North Korean nuclear weapon tests. With the understanding that these official statements are strategic communications instead of technical disclosures,[1] this article revisits North Korea’s six nuclear tests conducted to date through the lens of: 1) official statements, 2) information on nuclear devices in the open-source domain, and 3) newly published research on weapon programs from other countries.
By baselining the first two tests and the last test, the author concludes that the three relatively more ambiguous tests (third, fourth and fifth) possibly employed more advanced designs than previously assessed. Given these parameters, North Korea may have already achieved a level of miniaturization sufficient for delivery by a wide range of missile systems. As such, despite ongoing predictions of a seventh nuclear test for the Hwasan-31 tactical nuclear warhead (revealed by state media in 2023 but never tested), testing may not be technically necessary.
However, if Pyongyang decides to resume nuclear weapons testing, a new cycle might not only involve tactical nuclear warheads, but possibly also a new generation of further miniaturized devices suitable for more use cases, such as multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs).
