North Korea is believed to possess 50 nuclear weapons – 20 more than in the past year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) revealed in its annual report published on Monday on global militaries.
SIPRI’s “Yearbook 2024 Armaments, Disarmament and International Security” report assesses the known arsenals of nuclear states as well as global military development. It once again found that the vast majority of known nuclear weapons are in the possession of America and Russia, but that communist China is making significant efforts to expand and modernize its own arsenal. Notably, the report documented “the first time China is believed to have some warheads on high operational alert” in 2024.
In its section on North Korea, SIPRI warned that evidence suggests communist dictator Kim Jong-un is “putting new emphasis” on Pyongyang’s nuclear assets.
“SIPRI estimates that the country has now assembled around 50 warheads and possesses enough fissile material to reach a total of up to 90 warheads,” the report found, “both significant increases over the estimates for January 2023.”
“While North Korea conducted no nuclear test explosions in 2023, it appears to have carried out its first test of a short-range ballistic missile from a rudimentary silo,” SIPRI noted. “It also completed the development of at least two types of land-attack cruise missile (LACM) designed to deliver nuclear weapons.”
In 2023, SIPRI estimated that North Korea possessed 30 assembled warheads. North Korea has not tested a nuclear weapon since 2017 but regularly threatens to use its nuclear weapons against South Korea, in which it is in a state of formal war halted only by an armistice agreement signed in 1953.
