Identifying the critical facilities in North Korea's nuclear weapons program

Abstract

North Korea is still advancing its nuclear weapons program and continuously raising tension around the Korean Peninsula. However, nuclear talks on North Korea have been deadlocked for the recent few years. Therefore, in order to come to a mutual agreement on the value of a specific measure against North Korea’s nuclear weapons program among the stakeholders, the critical facilities should be objectively identified. This thesis identifies critical facilities in North Korea’s weapons program, using a Petri net based nuclear weapons latency (NWL) analysis. For the analysis, a timed Petri net model representing North Korea’s nuclear weapons program was constructed. After the validation of the model, five virtual scenarios were simulated using the model. As the result, the amount of change in NWL for each scenario showed that the importance of the five critical facilities could be prioritized: Yongbyon 5MWe reactor > Pyongsan uranium milling plant > expanded uranium enrichment plant in Yongbyon > Bakcheon uranium milling plant > IRT-2000 reactor. The findings provide a better understanding of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program from technical aspects. Also, the approach is expected to contribute to quantitative evidence based policymaking in foreign affairs beyond the North Korean nuclear issue.