SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Thursday unveiled a new facility to produce nuclear bomb fuels, with leader Kim Jong Un announcing plans to bolster the country’s nuclear forces “at an exponential rate.”
Some experts still question whether North Korea has functioning nuclear missiles that can reach the U.S. mainland. But the nuclear plant’s disclosure implies that Kim is eager to cement his country’s status as a nuclear power and has no intentions of placing his bomb program on a negotiating table.
After visiting the site on Wednesday, Kim said he and other top officials “confirmed the order of priority for implementing the ambitious future plan designed to beef up our state’s nuclear forces at an exponential rate,” according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
The site is likely a uranium enrichment plant
KCNA said the facility used “more sophisticated technology” but didn’t provide further details like its location. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff assessed the site as a uranium enrichment plant and said it was closely coordinating with the United States to monitor North Korean nuclear activities.
KCNA photos showed Kim walking through narrow aisles lined with dense rows of silver tubes and pipes, in what appeared to be a centrifuge hall. Another image showed him speaking with senior officials in a meeting room, where a blurred graphic depicting a cone-shaped object was spread across a table. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the graphic showed a warhead design.
It’s the third time that North Korea has disclosed a uranium enrichment site. In 2010, North Korea showed one at its main Yongbyon nuclear complex to visiting American scholars, and in 2024, North Korea released photos of another covert uranium-enrichment plant, which experts believe was at its Kangson complex.
Experts say the newly disclosed site is likely an additional uranium enrichment facility that North Korea is suspected to have been building at Yongbyon.
“Based on a preliminary analysis, it appears that this facility is likely the newly added Yongbyon enrichment facility. It appears to have two levels and represents a substantial expansion of enrichment capability,” said Ankit Panda, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“North Korea’s ongoing nuclear expansion does not have a near-term end in sight,” he said.
Last September, South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said that North Korea was operating a total of four uranium enrichment facilities including the Yongbyon complex, and that they were running everyday.
Kim wants nuclear weapons state
During his plant visit, Kim said the urgency for bolstering up the country’s nuclear war deterrent, both in quality and quantity, has grown because of confrontations with “the most ferocious enemies,” an apparent reference to the U.S. and South Korea.
Kim said exercising “the position of a nuclear weapons state” is his country’s “invariable” stand. He said North Korea’s nuclear materials production capacity has more than doubled compared with five years ago, a claim that cannot be verified independently.
Experts say Kim wants an international recognition as a nuclear state so that he could demand the lifting of U.N. economic sanctions. They say Kim would ultimately push for arms reductions talks with the U.S. as a way to win concessions in return for a partial surrender of his nuclear capability.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to resume diplomacy with Kim, but the North Korean leader responded the Americans must first drop its demand for North Korea to denuclearize as a precondition for talks.
Some question North Korea’s nuclear program
Since his first round of nuclear diplomacy collapsed in 2019, Kim has performed a provocative run of weapons tests and vowed repeatedly to “exponentially” expand the country’s nuclear arsenal.
This led to many experts believing North Korea now likely has nuclear missiles capable of striking the U.S. mainland. But some still note North Korea hasn’t proved it mastered last-remaining technological hurdles to obtain such missiles, including ensuring its warheads survive the conditions of atmospheric reentry. They say North Korea also need to perfect technologies to place multiple nuclear warheads on a single missile to defeat U.S. missile shields.
A senior South Korean official told lawmakers in 2018 that North Korea was estimated to have manufactured between 20 and 60 nuclear weapons, but some experts now put the size of the North’s arsenal at more than 100 warheads.
In 2023, North Korea unveiled a type of battlefield nuclear warheads. Some analysts speculated the warhead’s unveiling might be a prelude to a nuclear test. But North Korea hasn’t carried out a test, which would be its seventh detonation overall and the first since September 2017.
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