North Korea unveiled its largest warship to date on Tuesday, a 5,000-ton destroyer named Choe Hyon, at a ceremony at the Nampo shipyard on the country’s west coast. Supreme leader Kim Jong Un said the launch marked “a new chapter in the military history” of the country and claimed the navy had “put an end to more than 70 years of stagnation.”
Kim said the navy had long been “the weakest of all branches of our armed forces,” but insisted “things have clearly changed now.” He added that the fleet’s combat power would become “admirable beyond all imagination.” He also called on North Korean shipyards to build two new surface warships a year over the next five years, including cruisers twice the size of the Choe Hyon.
Analysts said the new destroyer is likely intended to carry anti-ship weapons and land-attack missiles, though North Korea has not officially confirmed those capabilities. Yu Ji-hoon of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses said the navy appears to be shifting from a coastal-defense model to one that extends missile and nuclear threats into the maritime domain.
Experts also said the ship poses a new challenge for North Korea’s adversaries, even if Pyongyang still has far to go before matching the modern navies of South Korea and the United States. They said the vessel could complicate foreign surveillance of the North Korean fleet and enforcement of UN sanctions. Leaf-Erik Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, suggested the pace of construction may point to substantial Russian material and technological support, as Pyongyang has sent troops and weapons to back Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
