Whoo, baby! Everybody's got a nuke!

[Opinion. Nukes, nukes, nukes, nukes, every little baby got nukes. Every nuke built increases the chance that some country gets fed up and fires one off. You may think this sounds like "national security". I think it means death and extinction. IOW, the end of the world. Goodnight, Irene.]

North Korea’s ‘exponential’ nuclear program: why Kim Jong-un is racing to expand his arsenal

The heightened rhetoric from Pyongyang has left analysts asking why North Korea appears to need so many nuclear weapons

Raphael Rashid in Seoul

The Guardian: 24 Jun 2026

At a ruling Workers’ party meeting that concluded this week, Kim Jong-un declared that steadily expanding North Korea’s nuclear forces was the “most correct and unique way” to cope with an increasingly unstable world, citing what he described as growing threats from the US and its allies.

The remarks were just the latest in a recent stream of commentary from North Korea’s leadership that has seen Kim pledge to equip warships with nuclear missiles, double weapons grade production and expand the country’s nuclear arsenal at “an exponential rate”.

“It is a force so large and so dispersed that no single strike could eliminate it, and [appears] increasingly difficult to dismantle through diplomacy,” says Peter Ward, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute in Seoul, who believes North Korea is using the spread of its arsenal to protect against intervention of the kind seen in Iran.

The recent US-led strikes on Iran reinforced a lesson North Korea has long since absorbed: states that stop short of a fully operational nuclear arsenal invite attack rather than deterrence.