North Korean state media claimed on Thursday that the belligerent Communist regime tested an undersea drone that could carry a nuclear warhead. The weapon is supposedly designed to wipe out enemy cities by sneaking close to harbors and detonating to cause a “radioactive tsunami.”
According to the North Korean dictatorship’s KCNA news agency, the drone was able to cruise at depths of up to 500 feet for over 59 hours before detonating its non-nuclear test payload.
“This nuclear underwater attack drone can be deployed at any coast and port or towed by a surface ship for operation,” KCNA boasted, adding that it could be used to eliminate naval strike groups in addition to coastal targets.
The weapon was designed to “stealthily infiltrate into operational waters and make a super-scale radioactive tsunami through an underwater explosion.”
According to KCNA, the test was personally overseen by dictator Kim Jong-un, who wanted to warn the U.S. and South Korea they are causing a “nuclear crisis” with their “intentional, persistent, and provocative war drills.”
North Korea’s state Rodong Sinmun newspaper published a photo of Kim standing next to a large torpedo, which may or may not have been the undersea drone. The article also included photos that purportedly showed the drone maneuvering underwater and then kicking up a pillar of water, depth-charge style, when its test warhead detonated.
In this photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, second right, supervises what it says a test launch of a Hwasal strategic cruise missile during an exercise in North Korea Wednesday, March 22, 2023. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: “KCNA” which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP)
Although North Korean media has never been observed testing such a weapon before, KCNA claimed the “radioactive tsunami” drone has been under development for over a decade, and was covertly tested at least 50 times before Thursday.
South Korean intelligence sources said they could not immediately verify whether the test was real, and analysts are uncertain whether North Korea has the capability to miniaturize nuclear warheads enough to fit in such a delivery vehicle.
Some analysts also questioned whether North Korea would be able to deploy and pilot an undersea drone with the kind of stealth capabilities KCNA claimed, so trying to fit a nuclear warhead into what amounts to a long-range torpedo might not be worth the effort, especially when North Korea has demonstrated alarming capability with aerial missiles that can hit the kind of targets the undersea drone would be meant to destroy.
Kim might have been inspired to put on a show of undersea drone power by Russia’s January 2023 rollout of the Poseidon “super torpedo,” a weapon designed to function in much the same way as North Korea’s atomic tsunami device.
If Russia’s claims are to be believed, the Poseidon is a far more sophisticated weapon than the drone tested by North Korea on Thursday. Poseidon have nuclear power plants in addition to nuclear warheads, theoretically enabling them to lurk underwater for very long periods of time. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin claimed in 2018 that the super-torpedoes have effectively unlimited range and could travel at greater speed and depth than any submarine.
“They are very low noise, have high maneuverability and are practically indestructible for the enemy. There is no weapon that can counter them in the world today,” Putin said.
“The first set of Poseidons have been manufactured, and the Belgorod submarine will receive them in the near future,” Russia’s state-run Tass news agency claimed on January 16. The Belgorod is a new class of Russian submarine designed to carry the huge 80-foot-long Poseidon torpedoes.
Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Seoul’s Ewha University, said North Korea’s claim to have produced a nuclear-capable undersea drone “should be met with skepticism.”
“But it is clearly intended to show that the Kim regime has so many different means of nuclear attack that any pre-emptive or decapitation strike against it would fail disastrously,” he told the Japan Times on Friday.
“I tend to take North Korea seriously, but can’t rule out the possibility that this is an attempt at deception/psyop,” Carnegie Endowment nuclear weapons specialist Ankit Panda concurred to the BBC.