Report: North Korea Has Up to 5,000 Tons of Chemical Warfare Agents

North Korea has likely amassed between 2,500 and 5,000 tons of chemical weapons, including extremely toxic nerve agents such as sarin, in recent years, according to estimates published in a joint report on Tuesday by the RAND Corporation and South Korea’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies, the website NK News reported.

“If [Pyongyang] deployed [its alleged sarin stockpile] in ideal conditions, the report estimates that a 1,000-kilogram sarin attack could kill as many as 125,000 people in South Korea,” NK News noted on August 30 after reviewing the analysis.

The joint report cited a “ROK 2018 Defense White Paper” as the basis for its estimate on Tuesday that Pyongyang possesses between 2,500 and 5,000 tons of chemical warfare agents. The ROK stands for the Republic of Korea, which is Seoul’s official name for South Korea.

“North Korea began producing chemical weapons in the 1980s and currently holds a stockpile of an estimated 2,500–5,000T of chemical weapons [sic],” the 2018 ROK Defense White Paper stated.

“The ROK Defense Ministry has been including in its White Papers the same estimate of the North Korean CW [chemical weapon] stockpile since 2000, and many other sources, including the U.S. Army, have given a similar estimate over time,” according to the analysis.

Chemical warfare agents are toxic chemicals that have been used in military conflicts since World War I (1914-1918). The extreme danger associated with the use of chemical weapons in warfare spurred the United Nations in 1997 to establish the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). The CWC is a “multilateral treaty that bans chemical weapons and requires their destruction within a specified period of time,” according to the Arms Control Association.

“The CWC is open to all nations and currently has 193 states-parties. Israel has signed but has yet to ratify the convention. Three states have neither signed nor ratified the convention (Egypt, North Korea and South Sudan),” the association noted in April 2020.

Pyongyang claims to harbor no chemical warfare agent stockpile despite apparent information to the contrary, such as the statistics cited by RAND Corp. and the Asan Institute for Policy Studies on August 30. North Korea is ruled by a secretive Communist regime that has been repeatedly sanctioned by the international community in recent years as part of a largely failed effort to discourage Pyongyang’s nuclear weapon proliferation.

The RAND Corporation is a think tank partially funded by the U.S. government that was founded in 1984 to provide research services to the U.S. military. The Asan Institute for Policy Studies is a South Korean think tank founded and chaired by Chung Mong-joon in 2008. Moog-Joon is the son of Hyundai Group founder Chung Ju-yung. Mong-Joon is a controlling shareholder of Hyundai Heavy Industries Group, which is the world’s largest shipbuilding company.