North Korean state media published new photos from inside a never-before-seen uranium enrichment facility on Friday. The photos show Kim Jong Un touring an industrial plant stuffed with rows of machines that produce the fuel that makes nuclear weapons possible. The images confirm what analysts have long suspected: North Korea has at least two plants capable of producing highly enriched uranium.
North Korean state media published five photos of Kim touring a nuclear facility at a site called Kangson, which is west of the capitol in Pyongyang. Kim is seen walking past rows of metal centrifuges capable of producing weapons-grade uranium. The visit coincided with a speech on Friday where Kim outlined economic plans and called for “exponential” nuclear weapons production to prevent the West from striking North Korea preemptively.
In July, the Federation of American Scientists estimated that North Korea had 50 nukes and enough material and infrastructure to build 130 by the end of the decade. The revelation of this new facility might change that estimation. Ankit Panda, Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told NK Pro that experts “may have to significantly revise many of the estimates that are out there at the moment on how much weapons-useable fissile material [North Korea] amassed.”
[Click photos to enlarge.]
The most well known of North Korea’s nuclear sites is Yongbyon, the site of the country’s first nuclear reactor and the home of its only publicly disclosed uranium enrichment facility. But experts like Panda and others have long suspected the existence of a second, older and secret, facility.
In 2018, Panda outlined the evidence for the existence of this secret facility. Construction began in the early 2000s along the banks of the Taedong River. “It is where, for more than a decade—possibly as long as fifteen years—North Korea has been enriching uranium for use in nuclear weapons. It is older than the well-known enrichment site operated by North Korea since at least 2010 at the old Fuel Fabrication Plant at Yongbyon,” Panda wrote in The Diplomat.
Analysis by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Middlebury Institute compared the photos from North Korea with satellite imagery taken over the last year of the suspected site at Kangson. Satellite photos showed Kangson undergoing some kind of expansion project in March and analysts were able to match that work to the interiors published in the recent photos.
The open source intelligence work outlined in NK Pro confirmed that the facility Kim toured is the one at Kangson, which had undergone recent construction. In his speech, Kim said North Korea needed even more centrifuges and more nuclear weapons.
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