North Korea Doubles Its Nuclear Arsenal

North Korea could possess 50 to 60 nuclear warheads, according to an assessment by Siegfried S. Hecker, Carlin’s co-author. Five years ago, Hecker and others estimated Pyongyang’s stockpile at roughly 35.

“What worries me the most is they’ve continued to increase the size and sophistication of their nuclear arsenal and delivery means,” said Hecker, who in the past has visited North Korea’s nuclear facilities as an international inspector.

Kim is playing a longer, more strategic game with a nuclear arsenal that has quickly grown since talks broke down at the February 2019 summit with former President Donald Trump in Hanoi. That has made predicting his next steps murkier and more worrisome.

Particularly troubling, security experts say, is how sure-footed Kim looks, despite widespread food shortages, a more confrontational South Korean administration and a U.S. that is rotating nuclear assets into the region more often.

At the 2022 weapons launch, Kim oversaw North Korea’s first full-range intercontinental ballistic missile test in nearly five years. In the past, Russia and China would have condemned the behavior at the United Nations. But Beijing and Pyongyang had grown tighter over their shared animosity toward Washington, and North Korea just weeks earlier had become one of the few countries to publicly back Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Since then, Pyongyang has ripped off eight more ICBM tests. The U.S. has tried more than a dozen times at the U.N. Security Council to condemn or punish the…   Kim regime. Each has failed.

For decades, officials often interpreted Pyongyang’s moves through the prism of a well-established “provocation playbook,” where weapons tests and bellicose language helped drive urgency around the world for talks with the regime. Kim and his predecessors used that attention to elevate the country’s global standing and win aid or sanctions relief by promising to halt its weapons activity, often covertly plowing forward anyway. But Kim has ditched that convention.

Now, Kim is developing his nukes more with an eye to keeping them than trading them away, even if it means living under sanctions. He is also rewiring dynamics inside the regime to share authority and create a more normalized government, and adjusting his relationships with allies by increasing the reliance on Russia, said Ken Gause, an expert on North Korean leadership who has been a consultant for the U.S. government.

The shift in tactics is difficult to see given Pyongyang’s self-isolation and adversarial relationship with Washington, Gause said. “Kim Jong Un is his own man at this point,” he said. “The problem is many people can’t see North Korea changing.”