INTERVIEW: ‘North Korea could have 300 nuclear warheads within 10 years’

Ankit Panda, an expert on North Korea’s nuclear program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was interviewed by Radio Free Asia regarding Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions and how its capabilities might be improved through North Korea’s support of Russia in its war with Ukraine.

Panda, a Stanton senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at Carnegie, also said that North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, very likely can be used to attack an American city, and that Pyongyang might have as many as 300 warheads within the next 10 years.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RFA: If North Korea were to launch an ICBM at the U.S. right now, do you think the U.S. would be vulnerable?

Ankit Panda: That’s a good question. First of all, would North Korea launch an ICBM? Probably not — it would be essentially suicidal. There’s no reason for North Korea to attack the United States unprovoked.

But the technical question that you asked, “Can North Korea essentially detonate a nuclear warhead over an American city?” — the answer to that question in my view is very probably yes, and that’s a carefully chosen phrase, “very probably yes.”

The North Koreans, the reliability that they have is probably a lot lower than what the United States has, but it’s probably sufficient for the purposes that Kim Jong Un seeks which is to deter the United States.

The only question that Kim has to ask himself is, “In a serious crisis or a war between the United States and North Korea, would an American president be worried that if the war got out of control, American cities could be vulnerable to nuclear attack?” And I think the answer there is absolutely.

RFA: But can’t the United States intercept North Korean ICBMs with its missile defense system?

Panda: The U.S. has a very limited homeland missile defense capability. We have a total of 44 interceptors that are capable of destroying incoming ICBMs. These interceptors are actually deployed in Alaska. There’s 40 of them in Alaska and four of them in California at Vandenberg Air Force Base. These are designed to deal with North Korean ICBM threats.

But it gets a little complicated here because it’s not that there’s 44 interceptors, which means the U.S. can defend against 44 North Korean ICBMs. Probably the U.S. would look to use 3 to 4 interceptors against one incoming ICBM reentry vehicle. And so then if you’re in North Korea, you have a solution to this problem, right? You build more ICBMs. And so that is where the North Koreans have gone.

I would argue that that is a chance that would be very difficult for an American president to take — this idea that the North Koreans could launch ICBMs and our interceptors might not actually work.

So we know from Ukrainian intelligence that there has been change in the KN-23s. … They used to be very inaccurate when they were first used. And it turns out there was a report in December 2024 that the precision has improved significantly, and that is a very, very important milestone for the North Koreans because — especially if they do want to deploy tactical nuclear weapons — precision of the missile system matters quite a bit because the yield of the weapon is a lot lower, the yield being the explosive power.

And so if you’re trying to leverage those types of tactical nuclear weapons for maximal military utility–let’s say you want to hit an airfield in South Korea that has F-35s that you can’t deal with once they take off, so you have to destroy them before they take off. You really need to make sure that the the yield of the weapon and the precision of the missile match essentially in terms of the mission that you’re trying to accomplish.

And so I really think that we shouldn’t underrate the ways in which North Korea’s missile transfers to Russia are very directly augmenting Kim Jong Un’s nuclear ambitions and strategy.

RFA: When we talk about North Korean involvement in Ukraine, experts and officials say that North Korea is getting from Russia food or other kinds of support, but regarding missile technology, what does Pyongyang need that Moscow can give?

Panda: The area where I think the Russians can really help them is with guidance computers, cruise missile maneuvering, cruise missile control and potentially even countermeasures, other types of ways in which to just improve the reliability of North Korea’s manufacturing standards for missile systems.

So all of that, I think will will happen is probably happening in some form space launch technologies, too. I think the Russians will be very, very eager to to help the North Koreans out. That has been the most public facing component of technical cooperation.

RFA: As North Korea and Russia grow closer, is there a possibility that Russia will recognize North Korea as an official nuclear state?

Panda: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has pretty explicitly said that Russia no longer views North Korea as a nonproliferation concern. Essentially, you know, since the early 1990s, the major powers China, Russia, the United States and Japan, South Korea, the European Union, the whole world has seen North Korea as a nonproliferation problem.

They’re the only country to have signed the Nonproliferation Treaty, left that treaty and built nuclear weapons. So it matters how you deal with North Korea for that reason. But it also matters in a big way that the North Koreans are really presenting unacceptable nuclear risks, in my opinion, to the United States and its allies, and so that demands a focus on risk reduction.

And so this this fact that Trump has called North Korea a nuclear power, I know that got quite a bit of a reaction in South Korea.

I’ve made the argument that, first of all, it’s it’s sort of overrated. North Korea has very publicly said in the past that they actually don’t care about the status question of whether or not they’re acknowledged, and they will never be a nuclear weapons state under the NPT, right, which is the only legitimate form of nuclear possession that really exists in the international system.

So I don’t think Trump is seeking to legitimize North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons. He’s simply saying something that even South Korea openly acknowledges, right?

RFA: How do you see North Korea’s nuclear development playing out over the next 10 years?

Panda: I think about this quite a bit because I do think it’s it’s probably the likely outcome that Kim will continue to modernize and size up his nuclear forces.

The North Korean objective with its nuclear modernization is to get to a point where what those of us in the nuclear strategy field call “the condition of mutual vulnerability” manifests between the United States and North Korea.

That means that Kim Jong Un has to feel confident. And this is very subjective, right? I’ve never met Kim Jong Un. I don’t know what’s in his mind, but Kim has to feel confident that no matter the crisis, no matter the war, the conventional war, that the United States and South Korea will not be able to destroy all of his nuclear weapons.

And that in turn, the president of the United States and the president of Republic of Korea will understand that they can’t destroy all of Kim’s nuclear weapons, which means that deterrence is stable….

So what does that mean for how many warheads they’ll build? I don’t know, probably a few hundred. I think by the mid 2030s we might be looking at a North Korea with 300-plus nuclear warheads.

RFA: How many warheads would you estimate that North Korea has right now?

Panda: So one of the challenges is that, since 2009, foreign inspectors have not been to North Korea. And so all of the evidence we have about fissile material production is really in the open source and from certain assessments the U.S. intelligence community has made.

Without people going into the country over time, the uncertainties, the error bars essentially grow wider and wider. I say that because my estimate would be that the North Koreans have somewhere between 50 to 100 nuclear warheads today. That’s a very broad range, right. And over time, that that range will continue to grow.

It’s quite possible that 10 years from now the North Koreans are the fourth largest nuclear force on Earth, after the U.S., Russia and China — depending on the choices that France, India, Pakistan and the U.K. make.

But none of those countries really seems to be heading towards a huge build-up in that way, whereas the North Koreans do have quite a few reasons to build up.

Edited by Eugene Whong.