A military parade to mark the 75th founding anniversary of North Korea's army took place in Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square, where more intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) than ever before were reportedly on display.
The ICBMs were paraded through the square as North Korea's leader Kim Jong-Un presided over the nighttime event. He was accompanied by his wife and daughter.
North Korea’s state-run media outlet reported that apart from the ICBMs, the parade featured a variety of tactical and long-range missiles, which the outlet described as crucial weapons supporting the North’s “power-to-power, all-out confrontation” against enemies.
London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies defense expert Joseph Dempsey, for his part, tweeted that North Korea’s largest-yet Hwasong-17 ICBMs were on display during the parade.
“Following the apparent Hwasong-17 ICBM pairs are four unidentified but apparently similarly sized canisterized systems," he tweeted.
Dempsey was partly echoed by Ankit Panda, a nuclear policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who tweeted, “It looks like 10-12 Hwasong-17 ICBMs made an appearance. This is cumulatively more ICBM launchers than we’ve ever seen before at a North Korean parade.”
In this photo taken in Pyongyang on March 25, 2022, students of the Pyongyang Jang Chol Gu University of Commerce watch footage of the previous day's launch of the Hwasong-17 missile - Pyongyang's first ICBM test since 2017
© AFP 2023 / KIM WON JIN
The parade came less than two months after the North Korean leader called for an “exponential increase” in his country’s nuclear arsenal in response to what Kim claims are threats from South Korea, which conducted a spate of regional military exercises both independently and jointly with the United States and Japan last year.
2022 saw Pyongyang test more missiles than at any time in North Korea’s history, including the Hwasong-17 ICBM, which is in theory capable of striking the US mainland.