Kangsong Gas Centrifuge Site

The regimge slogan Kangsong Taeguk [Kangsong Buguk] translates as "strong and prosperous state" or "rich nation, strong army" -- meaning a country that is militarily powerful and economically prosperous. Kangson was the old Japanese colonial-era name for Chollima.

North Korea unveiled details of its uranium enrichment facility for the first time on 13 September 2024, with its leader calling for increasing the number of centrifuges for uranium enrichment so it can increase its nuclear arsenal for self-defense. It marked the first time the North has publicly revealed details of its uranium enrichment facility. KCNA did not reveal the location of the facility, but South Korea and the United States believe North Korea operates uranium enrichment facilities at the Kangson nuclear complex and at the Yongbyon nuclear site. It may be an expansion of a site at the country’s main Yongbyon nuclear complex, about 60 miles north of Pyongyang. Nuke facility toured by Kim Jong Un is likely Kangson site near Pyongyang, analysis by James Martin Center suggested.

While touring the production site, Kim remarked that observing the facility “energizes” him and emphasized the need to further strengthen the foundation for producing weapons-grade nuclear material. North Korea first showed a uranium enrichment site in Yongbyon to the outside world in November 2010, when it allowed a visiting delegation of Stanford University scholars led by nuclear physicist, Siegfried Hecker, to tour its centrifuges. North Korean officials then reportedly told Hecker that 2,000 centrifuges were already installed and running at Yongbyon.

During his visit to the Nuclear Weapons Institute and the "production base of weapon-grade nuclear materials," Kim Jong Un "went round the control room of the uranium enrichment base to learn about the overall operation of the production lines," said the state-run Korean Central News Agency, or KCNA, on 13 Septembe 2024. Kim expressed great satisfaction after being briefed that the "base is dynamically producing nuclear materials," while stressing the need to "further augment the number of centrifuges in order to exponentially increase the nuclear weapons for self-defense true to the Party's line of building up nuclear armed forces," KCNA added, referring to the ruling Workers' Party of Korea.

Firstly, Kim Jong-un seeks to demonstrate through concrete actions that his recent statement about 'exponentially' increasing nuclear weapons was not merely rhetoric. Second, the regime aims to convey that North Korea is prepared to counter any nuclear threat with its own nuclear force regardless of who becomes the next U.S. President in the upcoming election.

South Korea condemned North Korea, saying the development of nuclear weapons is a "serious threat" to peace on the Korean Peninsula and to the world. "North Korea's illegal development of nuclear weapons is a clear violation of multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions," the South's unification ministry said, adding that the North must clearly recognize that the U.S. and the international community would not tolerate its nuclear weapons program under any circumstances. "We sternly warn the DPRK that any nuclear threats or provocations will be met with an overwhelming and powerful response from our government and military, based on the unwavering, integrated and extended deterrence system of the U.S.-ROK alliance," the ministry said.

"For analysts outside the country, the released images will provide a valuable source of information for rectifying our assumptions about how much material North Korea may have amassed to date," said Ankit Panda, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Overall, we should not assume that North Korea will be as constrained as it once was by fissile material limitations. This is especially true for highly enriched uranium, where North Korea is significantly less constrained in its ability to scale up than it is with plutonium," Panda said.

The North Korean photos showed about 1,000 centrifuges. When operated year-round, they would be able to produce around 20 to 25 kilograms (44 to 55 pounds) of highly enriched uranium, which would be enough to create a single bomb, according to Yang Uk, a security expert at Seoul's Asan Institute for Policy Studies. The new-type centrifuge Kim wants to introduce is likely an advanced carbon fiber-based one that could allow North Korea to produce five to 10 times more highly enriched uranium than its existing ones, said Lee Choon Geun, an honorary research fellow at South Korea's Science and Technology Policy Institute.

In May 2018, David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security reported "We have learned of a suspect gas centrifuge site, in addition to the one at the Yongbyon Nuclear Center, that has the name of Kangsong. It may have other names as well.... The original information about this site came from a defector several years ago who stated he worked near this site. Defector information must be confirmed. However, we have received the names of other alleged centrifuge sites that we viewed as less credible than the information about Kangsong. Moreover, this site appears to have received greater foreign governmental scrutiny and credibility than the other sites, particularly by the United States. "The exact number of centrifuges in the secret facility is difficult to predict but we have been told that governments estimate that it could contain 6,000-12,000 P2 centrifuges... Not all government analysts agree that it is a centrifuge site. Although there appears to be more information than just a defector report, some aspects of the building are not consistent with a centrifuge plant, leading senior officials in at least one government to not believing this facility is a centrifuge plant."

Albright provided a estimate of the number of wapons from all of the estimated Pu plus WGU from two centrifuge plants, as of the end of 2017. The median of this slightly skewed distribution was about 47 weapons, with the 5th and 95th percentile of 37 and 62 weapons equivalent.

In July 2018, Ankit Panda reported in The Diplomat that "The facility is North Korea’s first covert uranium enrichment facility, known by the U.S. intelligence community as the Kangson enrichment site. It is where, for more than a decade—possibly as long as fifteen years—North Korea has been enriching uranium for use in nuclear weapons. It is older than the well-known enrichment site operated by North Korea since at least 2010 at the old Fuel Fabrication Plant at Yongbyon."

The Diplomat, along with a team of open source researchers at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey led by Jeffrey Lewis, was able to locate the Kangson covert enrichment site.

Ankit Panda noted " the enrichment site was built a little more than five kilometers away from the city’s Mangyongdae neighborhood, North Korean founder Kim Il Sung’s birthplace, per North Korean propaganda. Thus, for more than a decade, North Korea has been enriching uranium in what is effectively a Pyongyang suburb, on the doorstep of Kim Il Sung’s mythologized birthplace."

Lewis later wrote "In 2018, some of us at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) successfully identified an alleged North Korean enrichment plant near Kangson. This discovery led us to reassess what we thought we knew about DPRK nuclear facilities. We were surprised at how close the Kangson enrichment plant was to Pyongyang. Other known DPRK nuclear sites, such as Yongbyon, are generally located far from the capital. We were also struck by a number of features at Kangson, including what appeared to be on-site housing and monuments commemorating unpublicized leadership visits. We believed these were possible signatures of undeclared nuclear facilities."