One day after 14 American 30,000-pound bombs thundered down on Iran, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry issued a typically florid public statement through its state-run media, claiming the United States had “violently trampled down the territorial integrity and security interests of a sovereign state.”
Unlike North Korea, Iran doesn’t yet have a nuclear weapon. But for North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, America’s airstrikes on Iran’s aspirational nuclear infrastructure must have reinforced what he has long held to be true: that possessing nuclear weapons is vital for his and his nation’s survival. Would the United States carry out such a brash, pre-emptive operation if Iran could credibly strike back with the bomb?
This calculus has been at the forefront of Mr. Kim’s mind since taking power from his father more than a decade ago. Nothing has diverted him from driving North Korea’s military, industrial and science communities to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that put targets on the United States and its allies.
And remarkably, he’s accomplished those tasks. Despite decades-long efforts by the United States and other world powers to persuade North Korea off the nuclear path, the small, isolated nation is estimated to have assembled around 50 warheads and produced enough fissile material for up to 40 more. Its arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles can very likely target every major U.S. city, and thousands of additional missiles are currently in range of U.S. military bases across the Asia-Pacific.
The internet is awash with photos of Mr. Kim observing missile tests, meeting with scientists designing those missiles and touring yawning complexes that produce bomb-grade atomic fuel. Mr. Kim wants the world to know that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, already formidable, is advancing each day.
Unlike with Iran, President Trump is not threatening war to disarm North Korea. In fact, five months into his second term, he doesn’t seem to be paying much attention at all, even as Mr. Kim has grown stronger through new nuclear weapons, missiles and alliances. If the United States was unable to inflict irreversible damage to Iran’s nuclear program through airstrikes, as some early intelligence suggests, it’s difficult to imagine the sort of sustained campaign that would be needed to succeed in North Korea.
Now that the flurry of military activity to neutralize Iran’s nuclear ambitions has died down, the intractable problem of North Korea’s program looms even larger. There are no outward signs that a similar mission is being considered. And it shouldn’t be. Let’s think instead about a more promising way forward.
Mr. Kim has repeatedly made it clear that he has no intention of giving up the program, seeing it as essential to ensuring his family’s hold on power. But Republican and Democratic presidents alike have nevertheless spent a quarter-century seeking North Korea’s “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.” (In 2021, President Joe Biden invited talks with Pyongyang with no preconditions, but that offer went nowhere.) This year, Mr. Trump became the latest commander in chief to publicly commit to the unrealistic goal of getting Mr. Kim to abandon his program altogether.
America can no longer afford for its outdated denuclearization demands to be an obstacle to kick-starting diplomacy. Though Washington does not officially acknowledge North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, the U.S. military already plans and conducts drills based on the fact that North Korea has a nuclear arsenal. Mr. Trump, himself, has publicly said on at least three occasions that it is a nuclear power. Acknowledging this as a diplomatic fact is a difficult decision, to be sure, but it is also necessary to achieve a breakthrough that can reduce tensions, avert unwanted war and prevent hundreds of new weapons from entering North Korea’s ever-growing arsenal.
The Trump administration should draw up a diplomatic road map that would freeze North Korea’s fast-growing nuclear program in place in exchange for relief from the sanctions that have crippled the nation’s economy. The policy upheaval is almost certain to trigger backlash from South Korea and Japan, the U.S. allies most directly threatened by North Korea’s nuclear program, and stoke concerns among other nations for rewarding North Korea’s bad behavior. But a change in approach is necessary to begin managing the mounting risks.
To understand the scope and sprawl of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, The Times examined dozens of commercial satellite and state-issued propaganda images collected by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Based on these images, it is hard to envision how Mr. Kim’s multibillion-dollar, yearslong investment in his nuclear and missile complex — spread across 28 sites, with likely many others underground — can ever be entirely dismantled. Acknowledging that reality, and getting Mr. Kim back to the negotiating table, is the only way to contain the growing threat that North Korea poses.
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then Washington’s approach to North Korea certainly meets that mark. The United States has never had formal diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, a policy that no longer makes sense with thousands of centrifuges spinning in North Korea all day, every day. If nothing is done, North Korea’s stockpile will continue to grow, narrowing its gap with the eight other nuclear powers.
Yongbyon
The focus of every denuclearization proposal that the United States has made to North Korea has included the complex at Yongbyon. Comprising hundreds of buildings peppered across about 10 square miles of low-lying hills, the Yongbyon nuclear complex produces North Korea’s plutonium, along with highly enriched uranium and tritium — all materials necessary to make thermonuclear weapons.
Initial construction began at Yongbyon in the 1960s following an atomic energy agreement with the Soviet Union. In 1991, North Korea lost its largest benefactor when the Soviet Union dissolved; the United States subsequently withdrew all its nuclear weapons deployed to South Korea. North and South Korea signed the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which led to the term “denuclearization” being ensconced in the political lexicon.
Pyongyang, however, pushed ahead with its nuclear weapons program at Yongbyon. The most notorious part of the infrastructure is a five-megawatt reactor, completed in 1986, that produces weapons-grade plutonium. The Clinton administration considered military strikes on the facility in 1994, but it determined the risks of all-out war were too high and opted for diplomacy instead.
The Agreed Framework signed by Washington and Pyongyang that year called for North Korea to halt the reactor and construction of two others, while pursuing follow-on agreements. Diplomacy fell apart in 2002 under the Bush administration when U.S. officials accused North Korea of seeking to enrich uranium. Yongbyon added a new enrichment hall in 2022, according to Middlebury’s analysis, building on other recent expansions to the site. In June, the United Nations noted the suspected construction of yet another centrifuge hall.
Kangson
Secret uranium centrifuge plants and other production facilities have been captured in satellite imagery around the country. Kangson, just outside Pyongyang, is one such location that has undergone recent expansion, according to Middlebury. No outsider had seen the centrifuge hall at Kangson until last September, when Mr. Kim made a high-profile visit to the site ahead of the U.S. presidential election and the government released images of the leader standing between vast rows of the cylindrical devices used to enrich uranium.
The Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based nonprofit, estimated in 2024 that North Korea had produced up to 4,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium and 178 pounds of plutonium. The country can potentially make enough material to build half a dozen new weapons annually.
Emboldened by advancements in weapons production, Mr. Kim first said in 2021 that he would expand his weapons program beyond city-busting hydrogen bombs to start building smaller-yield “tactical” nuclear warheads that are designed to fit on short-range missiles for regional targets. He has since said he’s developed enough of the smaller warheads, which are designed to be mounted on at least eight delivery systems, including a submarine drone.
Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site
After U.S. military forces invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein in 2003, North Korea pushed ahead with its missile and nuclear programs. In Pyongyang, the invasion was seen as a grim warning: Mr. Hussein didn’t have the bomb and he lost his power, then, ultimately, his life. North Korea wouldn’t make the same mistake.
Its first nuclear weapon test took place underground in 2006 at the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site in the country’s mountainous northeast, making North Korea the first and only nation to test a nuclear weapon since all other nations stopped doing so nearly a decade earlier.
The detonation, which was picked up by seismic and radiation sensors around the world, sent the international community in a tailspin. World leaders subsequently persuaded North Korea in 2007 to again agree to shut down a reactor at Yongbyon and invite International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors into the country for verification. It did both, but after diplomatic efforts later collapsed, inspections were no longer allowed and the reactor was restarted.
North Korea has since tested five more devices at the site, and America’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said in March that Mr. Kim was very likely preparing for another one. In 2018, parts of the site were blown up in an apparent show of good faith before a planned summit with Mr. Trump. The summit was canceled, and today, Middlebury analysis shows that North Korea has rebuilt the buildings and a tunnel entrance that were destroyed.
Hamhung
North Korea has built so many short-range missiles that it’s now selling them to Russia for use in Ukraine. All of those missiles are assembled inside a factory in Hamhung, the nation’s second-largest city. Analysts at Middlebury recently spotted two new buildings at the so-called Feb. 11 plant that they believe are being used for missile assembly and worker housing.
North Korea’s emerging strategic partnership marks one of the biggest opportunities for Pyongyang since the Cold War. For most of North Korea’s existence, China has been its staunchest ally. Beijing sent military forces to fight against the United States in the Korean War, and it has been its strongest trade partner and benefactor.
Last June, Pyongyang signed a mutual defense pact with Russia. Analysts believe Moscow is already providing North Korea with hard-won expertise on missile technology, helping it improve manufacturing practices, produce lightweight composite materials and capture performance data from missiles used on the Ukrainian battlefield. There are even recent reports that Russia is lending its assistance to North Korea’s nuclear submarine program.
Sohae
Although North Korea built and tested missiles under Mr. Kim’s father and grandfather, it wasn’t until the younger Kim took over in 2011 that the program matured after hundreds of tests. Many missile components are tested at Sohae Satellite Launching Station, located alongside the Yellow Sea, about 50 miles from Yongbyon.
The military is now armed with all manner of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, hypersonic delivery systems and large solid-propellant ICBMs that can be driven on a mobile launcher into a remote area and launched with no warning. Many land in the Sea of Japan, where fishing and shipping lanes separate North Korea and Japan, and some have even flown over parts of Japan.
The missile tests are carried out at a variety of sites across the country, including Sohae, which Middlebury analysis shows has been expanding in recent years.
Mr. Kim’s pace of testing brought Washington and Pyongyang to the brink of war in 2017 during Mr. Trump’s first term, when he threatened to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea. The heightened tensions ultimately led to a brief détente between the countries, when, for the first time, an American president and a North Korean leader spoke directly.
Three meetings between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim in 2018 and 2019 — as the pair exchanged love letters — that many hoped would slow down North Korea’s nuclear program ended in disappointment due in large part to hasty planning and the United States’ continued insistence on denuclearization. Mr. Kim held back from missile tests in 2018 and launched just a handful in 2020 and 2021, but the pace picked back up in 2022. In the past few years, under the Biden administration, Pyongyang test-fired more missiles than ever before while also revealing an array of new weapons.
So what do we know about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program? We know that its nuclear program’s infrastructure is vast. We know its weapons work. We know its missiles work. Why wouldn’t the United States negotiate to obtain better insight and open communication channels to help shape Mr. Kim’s choices in a potential crisis?
Pursuing diplomacy with North Korea won’t be universally popular. The regime is far from admirable. It has, among other things, advanced its military capabilities at the expense of its starving and impoverished population. But the looming nuclear threat is now so severe that joint U.S.-South Korea exercises in April involved nuclear weapon effects scenarios. It’s wise that they do, considering U.S. intelligence says North Korea could use a nuclear weapon early in a conflict to make up for its deficit in conventional capabilities.
It makes sense for the Trump administration to shift toward a strategy that aims to contain escalation rather than keep a white-knuckled grip on a failed policy. South Korea bristled when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth referred to North Korea’s “status as a nuclear power” during the confirmation process on his nomination. It was virtually the same language Mr. Trump offhandedly used when talking to the media. (The White House later walked the comments back.)
But common sense must prevail. No nation armed with an arsenal of this size has ever given it up — other than former Soviet nations, which didn’t control the weapons on their territories. Every president since Bill Clinton has missed an opportunity to rein in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions because of denuclearization’s all-or-nothing approach. Mr. Trump should not allow the shackles of the past to hobble his administration when there are more sensible strategies available to shape a more promising future.
Graphics by Aileen Clarke. Additional reporting by Spencer Cohen.
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W.J. Hennigan writes about national security, foreign policy and conflict for the Opinion section.
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