Typically, discussions about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) having weapons of mass destruction (WMD) center on the issue of its nuclear weapons program. Less talked about is Pyongyang’s chemical weapons (CW) arsenal, where they are made, and how many facilities where they are produced actually exist.
Unfortunately, comparatively little is known about the CW effort in the North, and what is known is limited. If statements by DPRK defectors are accurate, what we do think we know about the industry and research enterprises that make up the country’s chemical arsenal is like looking at an iceberg: what we can see is only a small fraction, and the rest is hidden beneath the surface.
North Korea Soldiers. Image Credit: KCNA/North Korean State Media.
HWASONG-18 ICBM North Korea. Image Credit: North Korean state media.
A detailed report released on 15 May provides one of the first detailed assessments of the DPRK chemical weapons (CW) program. The document was produced at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London using a set of open-source research tools and remote sensing technologies, and was conducted in cooperation with Global Affairs Canada.
The report zeroes in on Kanggye city in the DPRK’s Jagang Province, which has been referenced in open-source publications as being a research and development and industrial hub for the CW sector of the country’s military industry. The authors point out that, unlike some other major defense industrial sites in the DPRK, limited imagery is available of these facilities.
This has required the authors of the study to rely on a detailed examination of available literature to link various buildings or manufacturing sites with facilities referenced in these documents. The four specific enterprises that were examined in the RUSI report are: the General Precision Machine Plant; Jangjagang Machine Tool Plant; Kanggye Tractor Plant (also known as Plant No. 26); and a military storage site.
A Hard Intelligence Target
At the same time, the report highlights just how difficult a target is for those attempting to make accurate assessments of how far the isolated totalitarian state has advanced in the development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The region of Kanggye is the area most frequently cited as the center for the DPRK’s CW activity, but as the report points out, “current evidence from imagery and thermal analysis is inconclusive.”
The Kanggye Tractor Plant, write the authors, “most closely matches reported CW attributes, such as rail connectivity, proximity to munitions production, and underground access, but overall confidence in identifying [all of] the CW sites remains low.” The authors also point out that a 2022 feasibility study conducted in cooperation with UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory concluded that “it is unlikely that an individual facility is responsible for start-to-finish production of [the DPRK’s] CW.”
An assessment of just how hard an intelligence target the DPRK is for US and other nations’ agencies was written in 2017 during US President Donald Trump’s first term. The conclusion was that the US military “likely doesn’t have enough accurate intelligence to take out its nuclear and missile facilities even if President Donald Trump ordered it.”
North Korea, as the article is titled, is literally a “Black Hole for Spies.”
Quoted for the same article was Douglas Paal, who is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and conducts the organization’s Asia program. He is also a former National Security Council staffer for former President George H.W. Bush (41).
“If you’re giving options to the president … one of the very first things we have to say is we can strike what we can see, but we don’t know what we can’t see. Generally speaking,” he said about the DPRK’s WMD efforts, “I don’t think it’s overstating to say we’re still groping in the dark.”
How Large is the CW Program
The RUSI report also cites a 2022 RAND analysis, which cited an interview with a DPRK defector who estimated that there are around 75 CW storage locations across North Korea. Looking at the patterns of traffic analysis of rail shipments into the Kanggye Tractor Plant “may reveal peak periods of activity and any logistical relationships it holds with defence depots,” reads the RUSI document.
But if the defector’s information referenced in the RAND document is correct, the sites examined by the RUSI investigators barely scratch the surface of determining the size and scale of the DPRK’s CW effort.
The worst-case scenario, reads the RAND assessment, is that in the case of hostilities, “North Korea would likely employ all of its WMD and cyber capabilities, including nuclear weapons, hoping to win the conflict and avoid regime destruction. Use of these weapons would substantially transform the nature of a major war in Korea and cause immense damage to ROK and US military capabilities and civil society.”
And as the RUSI investigation concludes, the DPRK’s CW industry is probably the biggest blind spot in assessments of Pyongyang’s capabilities.
“The 2017 assassination of Kim Jong Un’s half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, with the nerve agent VX, in an attack that was widely accepted as being orchestrated by North Korea served as a reminder of the longstanding North Korean CW programme,” write the authors.
The attack highlighted that “very little is known about it, in contrast to the international attention paid to the country’s missile and nuclear programmes.”
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two consecutive awards for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
