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SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea is rapidly upgrading its nuclear facilities, the head of the United Nations’ atomic agency said Wednesday, as the U.S. and Israel wage war on Iran to keep the Mideast adversary from developing its own nuclear weapons.
The only country to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty, North Korea has doubled down on its nuclear efforts, with its congress in March codifying Pyongyang’s status as a permanent nuclear-armed state with plans to expand and modernize its nuclear capabilities.
“We have been able to confirm that there is a rapid increase in the operation of the Yongbyon reactor … and the activation of other facilities apart from Yongbyon,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said during televised remarks in Seoul. “All of them point to a very serious increase in the capability of [North Korea] in the area of nuclear weapons production, which is estimated at a few dozen warheads.”
The Yongbyon complex, in northwestern North Korea, has generated spent plutonium as a fissile material, but North Korea is also enriching uranium, which is considered more effective for weaponization.
Earlier, Mr. Grossi told IAEA governors that the agency was monitoring a new building at Yongbyon, similar to a uranium enrichment facility at Kangson, near the capital, Pyongyang, Reuters reported.
Yongbyon is built around a plutonium-based reactor acquired from the Soviet Union. It started operations in 1986.
In 1994, the U.S. and North Korea signed the Agreed Framework, a multilateral effort to halt plutonium production at Yongbyon in exchange for the provision of a less weaponizable light-water reactor. Spent fuel from plutonium can be processed into nuclear arms.
Production was frozen, but the deal was undermined by mistrust on both sides.
In 2002, U.S. officials accused North Korea of operating a separate, secret, uranium enrichment facility. That accusation led to the unraveling of the Agreed Framework in 2003. That year, Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In 2006, North Korea tested its first nuclear device. It detonated five more, with increasing yields, through 2017. It also showed off its long-suspected uranium enrichment facilities in 2010.
Questions still hang over whether North Korea has mastered the technology to secure the reentry vehicles that tip ballistic missiles when they reenter Earth’s atmosphere and whether the state has successfully compressed its fissile materials to warhead size.
Regardless, it is widely accepted, though not formally recognized, that North Korea is a nuclear state.
North Korea’s expanding nuclear capabilities could undermine arguments against proliferation, given that nations that have surrendered nuclear arms, such as Ukraine, or have abandoned nuclear programs, including Iraq and Libya, have suffered devastating conventional attacks.
On March 5, seven days into the Iran war, Israel’s plainspoken envoy to South Korea underscored that point in a press conference.
“Our goal is that Iran won’t have nuclear weapons,” Ambassador Rafael Harpaz said. “We will do our utmost to avoid Iran from becoming North Korea.”
Five days later, American geopolitical thinker Francis Fukuyama endorsed an X post stating, “North Korea was right about nuclear weapons.”
The number of warheads North Korea possesses is unknown. Consensus estimates are around 50.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported last year that Russia had deployed 5,580; the U.S., 5,328; and China, 500.
How many North Korea plans to build is unknown, but state leader Kim Jong-un regularly urges upgrades to nuclear arms, known colloquially as North Korea’s “sacred sword” and constitutionally enshrined.
“It is our party’s firm will to further expand and strengthen our national nuclear power, and thoroughly exercise our status as a nuclear state,” he said, according to state media reports at the conclusion of the Ninth Party Congress in February. “We will focus on projects to increase the number of nuclear weapons and expand nuclear operational means.”
Delivery systems encompass large-caliber, multiple-launch rocket systems, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.
Three seaborne platforms — an unmanned nuclear torpedo, and submarine- and destroyer-launch systems — are at various stages of development.
The country’s “sacred sword” was forged at a massive cost. North Korea is believed to spend, at a conservative estimate, 26% of its gross domestic product on defense.
“We think of lower and upper bounds of how many warheads they have, and the next question is what is the marginal utility of an additional warhead or warheads,” said Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based international relations expert. “There is opportunity cost: You have food insecurity, but you have nuclear weapons, and engineers and scientists working on this, and these skills are not easily transferred into agricultural production.”
It is not just external threats that motivate Pyongyang. Internal dynamics also exist.
State media have described U.S. attacks on Iran as “gangsterlike conduct.”
America is widely demonized in North Korea. Actors wearing rattails portray U.S. troops in kindergarten plays, and bloody artworks illustrate alleged U.S. atrocities during the 1950-1953 Korean War.
“Authoritarian regimes generally exaggerate external threats so they can use fear to control and manage society: ‘The Yankees are going to invade any day now,’” Mr. Pinkston said. “There is a rally-round-the-flag effect — the same in the U.S. as the ‘Teflon Effect’ — that deflects criticism, but they have been doing it for 70 years.”
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