North Korea's Arsenal Has Grown Rapidly. Here's What's in It.
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea test-launched what it called a newly developed tactical guided missile Thursday, violating international sanctions.
It was the country’s first ballistic missile test in a year and its first provocation to the Biden administration, prompting President Joe Biden to warn that there will be “responses” if North Korea continues to escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
A senior North Korean official, Ri Pyong Chol, replied defiantly Saturday, warning that if the United States keeps making “thoughtless remarks without thinking of the consequences, it may be faced with something that is not good.”
The United States has tried both sanctions and dialogue to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons programs.
Neither has worked.
Instead, North Korea has rapidly expanded its nuclear program and modernized its missile fleet under Kim Jong Un, the country’s young leader. The expansion of the arsenal is a growing threat to the United States and allies in the region. Here’s what’s in it.
There are nuclear warheads and more.
North Korea’s ballistic missiles can carry nuclear warheads, and the country conducted six increasingly sophisticated underground nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017. The last four of them happened under Kim.
Its last and most powerful nuclear test was conducted in September 2017, when North Korea claimed to have detonated a thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb. Estimates of the device’s explosive power ranged from 50 to 300 kilotons.
A mere 100 kilotons would make the test six times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
North Korea has extracted plutonium, an atomic bomb fuel, from its Soviet-designed nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang. It also runs centrifuges to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium, another bomb fuel.
As of January 2020, North Korea had 30 to 40 nuclear warheads and could produce enough fissile material for six or seven bombs a year, according to an estimate by the Arms Control Association.
Although the world is preoccupied with the North’s nuclear weapons, the country has also stockpiled thousands of tons of chemical and biological weapons agents that it can deliver with its missiles. When Kim’s estranged half brother, Kim Jong Nam, was assassinated in Kuala Lumpur in 2017, North Korea used the internationally banned VX nerve agent in the operation.
Its missiles can fly longer ranges.
In 2017, North Korea made big strides in its weapons capabilities.
That year, the country fired its intermediate-range ballistic missile, Hwasong-12, over Japan and threatened an “enveloping” strike around the U.S. territory of Guam. It also test-fired Hwasong-14 and Hwasong-15, the country’s first intercontinental ballistic missiles.
By the end of the year, Kim claimed that his country had the ability to launch a nuclear strike against the continental United States.
After 2017, Kim stopped testing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, but threatened to end his moratorium when talks with President Donald Trump collapsed in 2019.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/north-koreas-arsenal-grown-rapidly-141515615.html