"There is no publicly available evidence that North Korea has produced an operational nuclear warhead for delivery by an intercontinental-range ballistic missile," the institute said. "But it might have a small number of warheads for medium-range ballistic missiles."
The report said that the figures for North Korea are "highly uncertain" and are not included in its final tally of 13,080 weapons globally.
North Korea has stayed away from nuclear weapons tests since 2017 and did not test-launch long-range ballistic missiles in 2020, the report said.
But the regime "continued production of fissile material and development of short and long-range ballistic missiles" away from the public eye, the institute said.
Tellingly, out of the $72.6 billion that countries spent on nuclear weapons in 2020 globally, $27.7 billion went to less than a dozen defense contractors to build nuclear weapons, which in turn spent $117 million lobbying and upwards of $10 million funding most major think tanks writing about nuclear weapons, the SIPRI report pointed out.
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