SEOUL, South Korea — 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.
Kim Jong Un rides a tank driven by his teenage daughter
KCNA said the facility used “more sophisticated technology” but did not 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 was not immediately clear whether the graphic showed a warhead design.
It’s the third time that North Korea has disclosed a uranium enrichment site. In 2024, North Korea released photos of another covert uranium-enrichment plant. In 2010, North Korea showed one at its main Yongbyon nuclear complex to visiting American scholars.
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 every day.
During his plant visit, Kim said the need to bolster 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 international recognition as a nuclear state so that he can 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 that the Americans must first drop their demand for North Korea to denuclearize as a precondition for talks.
Since his first round of nuclear diplomacy with Trump 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 many experts to believe that North Korea is now likely to have nuclear missiles capable of striking the U.S. mainland. But some note that North Korea has not proved it has mastered the remaining technological hurdles to obtaining such missiles, including ensuring its warheads survive the conditions of atmospheric re-entry. They say North Korea also needs 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 20 to 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 warhead. Some analysts speculated the warhead’s unveiling might be a prelude to a nuclear test. But North Korea has not carried out a test, which would be its seventh detonation overall and the first since September 2017.
