North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Ankit Panda: North Korea’s deterrence calculus after US strikes on Iran

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

International security expert Ankit Panda joins the podcast this week to unpack the latest U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran and what they could mean for North Korea’s deterrence thinking. The conversation covers what does and doesn’t translate to the Korean Peninsula: the impact of geography and escalation dynamics, why saturation tactics and interceptor “magazine depth” matter […]

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round brew. Each design is a conversation starter. Find yours at shop.n.knews.org. Again, that's shop. com.news.com. Hello, listeners, and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jacko's sweatsuit. And today, it is Tuesday. No, no, it is Monday the 2nd of March, 2026, late in the evening. And I'm joined from the United States by Ankhad Panda. Ankhut, welcome back on the show. Thanks, Jacko. It's great to be back. You were last on the show, if my memory serves around four years ago in February 2020. And we're going to talk today about the U.S. and Israeli joint strikes on Iran and what North Korea might be learning from that.

And then perhaps also a little bit of a teaser at the end about the Congress that they recently wrapped up last week in North Korea. They had over a longer discussion that you and I will have hopefully in person, in Seoul at the end of this month when you visit. So in a piece that you wrote for your Nukes letter, which people can find at pander. You've described Iran's approach over the last year as a, quote, catastrophic approach to deterrence that compounded multiple errors. At the highest level, I'd like to ask you, what failed first? Was it the restocking of Iranian missile stocks, the nuclear threshold posture, the diplomacy, or the strategic concept that tied it altogether? Yeah, so thanks, Jacko.

I think for me, if you really kind of ask me what is the essential component of the dominoes essentially falling on Iranian deterrence failures, that have now resulted in the Supreme Leader's death. I would actually say it's the decision in 2024 to launch Operation True Promise 1 and 2. These were the two rounds of strikes that year by Iran against Israel. Why do I identify that as crucial? Deterrence is, of course, the art of prevention. You are trying to, of course, deter actions against your state

by leaving some uncertainty about the consequences that might follow if a war were to break out. Operations True Promise 1 and 2 in 2024, for, in my opinion, removed a lot of uncertainty around the efficacy of Iran's missile forces. It kind of showed that the Iranians had a lot of doctrinal, command and control, employment shortcomings that it does appear to have been very much taken into course by the Israeli Air Force when they planned for the 12-day war, what became Operation Rising Lion, the Israeli air operations. So that was a fundamental piece that, of course, got Iran to the 12-day war, which was the really

important inflection point last year. Since the 12-day war, I've held the view that the Israelis would essentially at some point have to go back in to continue this conflict when a nuclear issue in particular remain unresolved. And of course, as we've seen in the last few days, the United States has, of course, joined that fight. And so that for me is the essential, central failure for the Iranians. But, you know, we can talk a bit more about the threshold and the diplomacy thing, too. Right. Yeah, I'll definitely get into that. Now, you, so you argue that Iran's ballistic missile arsenal, it despite its size, effectively became a live-fire training opportunity for Israeli and U.S. defense forces. What was the core strategic miscalculation here?

Well, so when you use a missile arsenal, you better use it to strategic effects that actually advanced some theory of victory for your country, right? And for Iran, for the longest time, you know, I mean, let's take ourselves back to the mindset many people who were in before Operation True Promise 1 in April, right? April was the largest ballistic or missile exchange in the Middle East that we'd seen in a long time. That was when the Iranians sent hundreds of drones and then struck just a couple of targets in Israel, but they focused primarily on a Nevitim air base where we observed some impacts. But it wasn't clear at all that there was any logic to that apart from Iran wanting to impose a very narrow type of punishment on Israel, which they of course did not

actually succeed in, I would argue, in a really important way. Israel had a fairly fresh array of long-range missile defense interceptors and short-range Iron Dome interceptors to limit quite a bit of the damage that the Iranians were launching. It also, I think, gave the Israelis a very good idea of the ways in which Iran would carry out missile operations in a time of war. I don't get into this in the substack, but, you know, Israel, Iran is the highest consequence military intelligence target for Israel. So the amount of energy Israel spends in understanding, you know, patterns of life in Iran, I don't think should be underrated. Of course, again, with deterrence, you don't want to create patterns of life for your adversary about how you would actually behave in a time of conflict

or war, and Iranian ballistic missile operations during True Promise 1 and 2, I think, do also end up generating that for the Israelis, which means that the odds of Israel being as successful as it was during the 12-day war in destroying launchers in particular for Iranian missiles, I think also relates partly to that. So there's that link between deterrence and war fighting. Once deterrence fails, you have to sort of fight a war. With True Promise 1 and 2, we didn't get a full-scale war. We got these kind of long-range exchanges. But by the time the 12-day war and now, epic fury and roaring lion have come around. The Iranians have dearly paid the price of their tactical and operational missteps. North Korea also has a lot of artillery, effectively big cannons

facing Seoul as well as missiles that it uses for deterrence. What would Pyongyang possibly be learning from how Iran's mass salvos were intercepted? Yeah, so there's I think some comparisons and some clear limits to the to the analogies between the two sides. I mean, first, there's is a geographic difference that I think just has to be pointed out. North and South Korea are contiguous countries, the shortest flight times for rocket artillery systems, artillery systems as in the order of, in some cases, less than one minute. So really not meaningful from the perspective of missile defense where there is a software and sensor process that has to happen before your interceptor has to fly, which also costs you time. And I think Seoul understands this,

right, which is why even before North Korea had nuclear weapons in the mid-1990s in particular, when this type of a war was actually, of course, very much being contemplated by the Clinton administration to prevent a long-term North Korean nuclear capability. The threat of artillery strikes against Seoul was a very capable, conventional deterrent capability for North Korea. But the observation that I'm sort of chewing on Jacko, and this is why it's nice to be on a podcast because I'm not sure I'm fully ready to commit to this yet in writing, is, you know, what I look at what the North Koreans are doing, and, you know, we'll talk about this when we get to the party of Congress. there's a big focus right now for Kim Jong-un in conventional modernization, right? He's got a lot of dual-capable nuclear and conventional missiles. Some 11 series in particular comes to the top of my mind, the K-N-25, the sort of 600-millimeter artillery system that he's been really focused on. But as I think the Iranians have shown, if you do get a deterrence failure or a significant skirmish,

you better be ready to operationally execute in a way that advances your post-war deterrence objectives or your post-Kermish deterrence objectives and your intra-war deterrence objectives, right? Deference continues to exist within a war, which is, again, I think what the Iranians have been trying to implement in the last 48 hours, which is how do you sort of impose pain on a bunch of Gulf countries

to sort of get them to go to the United States and get the U.S. to stop the war, has not worked again. And so the North Koreans do need to give thought to these matters as well. And again, you know, I mean, at the top, I will just say that North Korea, of course, having possession of nuclear weapons is not really learning anything new, right?

A lot of journalists have asked me, what is Kim learning from the Maduro rate, from what's happened to Iran? I'd say, you know, these are parts of the same story the North Koreans have been telling themselves for more than two decades about why they need nuclear weapons. So on the central deterrence question, I don't actually think the North Koreans are learning something they didn't already know. I think this very much feeds into their worldview about why nuclear weapons will help them avoid the fate that is the fall in the Ayatollah now. Okay, that kind of preempts my next question. Is there anything that you can imagine that the DPRK diplomats sitting in their employees, in Tehran this week might be cabling back to emphasize about integrated air and missile defense? Well, so integrated air and missile defense does complicate your employment strategy. But again,

you know, so we have to talk a little about why the Iranians are targeting in the way that they're targeting right now, right? So the Iranians had, you know, True Promise 1, 2, and 3, very much a mixed record of successfully piercing Israeli air defenses. And, you know, there is an open debate about how much of Israel's air defense was reconstitute. Iron Dome interceptors are plentiful, relatively cheap, but the aerosystem, which is the exo-atmospheric interceptor for the really long range, you know, Khoramshar, which is actually based off of the North Korean Musudan, you know, those interceptors are more scarce. So the Iranians, I imagine, would have, you know, considered what the magazine depth for interceptors would have been in

Israel. Should they have tried with true promise for to continue hitting Israel? Clearly they've decided a mix is what works best for them, which, again, I find a little. bit puzzling, but they have chosen to now strike a number of countries in the Gulf to impose costs. But again, these Gulf countries were not struck in the past. So they actually have a fairly complete magazine of interceptors to use again. So if you're North Korea, this is not really too analogous, right? You do have Japan and South Korea. You have two countries with military targets. The old assumptions about North Korea, and when I say old, I really mean post-2017 when they had nuclear weapons, was that some of these conventional deterrence questions were not that relevant

because the North Koreans had the world's lowest threshold for nuclear use. So if a serious war began and targeting of Japan and deep in South Korea had already commenced, you know, beyond just war fighting around the military demarcation line on the Korean peninsula, nuclear weapons likely would have been used. But now I think, you know, with the kind of conventional mix that the North Koreans clearly seem to be valuing, you know, Kim Jong-un just at the party Congress was talking about unmanned systems as well. You know, he's been very interested in drones and cruise missiles.

I do think the North Koreans will pay attention to how interceptor magazines will be spent down. And this is already a concern in Seoul, which is that the North Koreans are building these lower cost, loitering munitions, drones, and even cruise missiles to basically throw a bunch of stuff at South Korea early in a conflict to saturate low altitude, short-range air defenses before then following up with higher value a nuclear system. So again, some analogies there, but some pretty important distinctions, I would say. Okay, I want to move on to nuclear threshold. one of the sharpest contrasts that you make is between Iran's threshold nuclear strategy and North Korea's race to a minimally viable nuclear deterrent. Why did Iran end up in what you call

to middle ground? Yeah, so look, I probably should have spent a little bit more time talking about this, but, you know, it's a substack post, and so there's, again, limits to how deep I was going. So, I mean, the basic argument is that, you know, the North Koreans built the bomb, and so they achieved deterrence effects against the United States and South Korea in a way that Iran does not. I would hazard that North Korea probably has very little sympathy for Iran's fundamental outcome here because of Iran's proximity, right? Iran was the non-nuclear weapon state. That was the closest to the bomb for a long time, especially after the collapse of the JCPOA. They had about 10 weapons worth of highly enriched uranium that did get entombed last summer after Midnight Hammer in particular, the U.S. air operation. But Iran made no decision to weaponize. So is that a kind of nuclear latency? Is that the term for it? Yes, you could call it latency. You could call it the threshold, you know, depending on how you want to really characterize it. But basically, they sort of walked up to the threshold without walking over the threshold.

And look, I mean, I will say here, I don't really talk about this in the post. But, you know, again, the differences between the two cases are instructive here, right? The Iranians have, you know, they had an active weaponization program in the early 2000s. They stopped that work, we think, after 2003. And in the aftermath of that, they have preferred diplomacy for a variety of reasons. But one of those reasons is that, I don't think they actually thought that they could get away with weaponization without the Israelis and the Americans attacking them. And again, that has to do with Iran's a country of 90 million people, fairly well integrated with a global economy when you compare it to a case like North Korea, which is famously a hard intelligence target with a very difficult and oppressive human intelligence environment internally. What we've learned in the last two years is that I had pretty generous assumptions about how well Israeli intelligence had penetrated Iran. Those assumptions have been revised upward, which is to say that the Iranians have been extremely well penetrated.

Israel. And so the deterrent factors that existed for the Iranians in deciding to change their approach to nuclear latency or the threshold or just deciding to seek the bomb, I think should not be understated, right? And again, they had IAEA verification, which of course since last year has not been operative. But in the past, they would have had to send a very dangerous signal by essentially either kicking inspectors out deliberately to divert nuclear material for a weapons program or constituting a fully covert enrichment facility or program, which, again, could have been detected. So there were still factors that I think shaped Iranian decision-making here that I don't talk about in the post. But the broader picture is that, you know, to go back to the diplomats in Tehran, cabling back to Pyongyang,

I think it will be, you know, that North Korea's leader and leaders essentially got the big picture right, especially post-the Iraq war. And, you know, I don't know how much the North Koreans will appreciate the factors I've described about why the Iranians didn't actually go there. But there's another important lesson here for just, I mean, proliferators will face very different decision-making pressures, right? And here I'm talking about anybody listening that might think South Korea needs a bomb or Europeans who think, no, European states need a bomb. Every country will have a very discrete set of decision-making factors that will weigh into, you know, how to think about latency, how to think about how far to go within the spectrum of nuclear latency, what to do if you do arrive at the threshold, et cetera. And so I think this case can also be considered in those debates. Now, we only have a couple of minutes left. I want to quickly get onto diplomacy. Now, you're suggesting

your substack posted Iran may have mistaken negotiations for protection against an attack. How do you think Pyongyang interprets that lesson? Yeah, that's an interesting one, right? Because there's a lot of talk about whether Trump and Kim will engage again. Historically, we've seen a pattern that when North Korean, the United States do talk, military tensions do go down. The North Koreans usually cease missile testing activity and some of their most troublesome behavior compared to when the two sides are not talking. In this particular case, I think it was a tactical play for the Iranian. So obviously, the backdrop, but you know, a lot of what I say in that post, I think is in the bigger context of the last 24 months. You could even go as far back as October 2023 and the Hamas attacks on

Israel. But the broader picture here is that given that Iran needed time to reconstitute its missile arsenal and get its command of control back in order following a rising lion in the 12-day war, the diplomatic process with the United States, I think was a tactical play. But again, I think the Iranians fundamentally misread just the extent of good faith, I would say, in the United States in terms of the engagement. You know, my assessment, and this might be contested, you know, my just looking at the Trump administration is that there was no real attempt here to get a compromise, right? Diplomacy is ultimately the art of compromise. And the United States was unwilling to compromise with Iran. And the Iranians had their red lines, right?

I mean, I think people who disagree with me will say, well, the Iranians had the opportunity to accept a zero enrichment. deal that completely limited their ballistic missile arsenal. But again, if you're Iran and you're in an adversarial relationship with Israel, it makes it very difficult to do that, especially when you probably understand that the United States does not have the perfect ability to control and shape Israeli decision-making. So the diplomacy for me is, you know, probably the least important part of the deterrence failure story, but it has obviously had an effect, I think, in shaping the Iranian approach, particularly in the month or so leading up to this war. Would you say this is perhaps reinforcing North Korea's deep skepticism of negotiations with the United States, or paradoxically,

could it encourage North Korea to accelerate weapons programs further before engaging diplomatically? Look, I mean, I think the North Koreans are very careful students of American politics. In 2017, you know, I've argued that it basically took North Korea until about August 2017, if you remember the Guam crisis that year, to really learn that Donald Trump was a very different American president than all the American presidents North Korea had dealt with since the Korean war, essentially. this time around, I would be, I would, you know, I'd be willing to hazard that the United States approach to the use of force and the seeming erraticness with the United States just behaving in wanton ways around the world is actually going to be on balance a dissuading factor for the North Koreans in terms of engagement with, with the U.S. It's not that the U.S. is going to start a war with North Korea. Again, I think North Korea's nuclear deterrence capabilities are quite robust. It's just that, you know, what are the lessons you take away on diplomacy? Again, the North Koreans need.

to believe that the United States will be ready to accept a compromise. You know, as Kim put it at the Party Congress, peaceful coexistence, coexistence of some kind. Until he sees that, I don't think the North Koreans are going to be particularly itching to meet with Donald Trump. Okay. And last two questions here. In a piece that you Ruddard wrote that was published just today on NK Pro about Kim Jong-in's new five-year weapons plan based on the party Congress they wrapped up last week, you highlight the new emphasis on counter space capabilities. So in light of what we We're seeing in Iran with command and control disruption air dominance mattered enormously. How significant is North Korea's interest in anti-satellite or space denial systems?

Yeah. So, you know, just to put a pin on it, this party Congress is the first time that we have high-level political guidance from the workers' partners endorsed by Kim Jong-un in a final report to focus on counter space weapons. So it's a really important inflection point. I would sort of compare it to the endorsement of tactical nuclear weapons at the eighth party Congress, which was the first time North Korea endorsed that particular set of capabilities. The U.S. is building a golden dome. There's a lot going on in space. South Korea has

aspirations to launch more military satellites as well. So it's rather logical for the North Koreans to turn in this direction. The question I have is what kind of counter space weapons is North Korea considering? The Party Congress report is ambiguous on that front, but I'm sure the Academy of National Defense Science and our good friends, Zhang Chang and so on, will have answers for us soon. But one possibility is that North Korea will look at nuclear capable anti-satellite weapons, which sound horrifying, and they are horrifying, but they are actually a very attractive option for North Korea, when the current name of the game in space for the United States

is proliferating constellations, right? So instead of having a small number of big, fat, juicy satellites, the United States is moving towards a model where it will have hundreds of smaller, less juicy satellites. And so destroying a smaller constellation might require a nuclear weapon. And, of course, the U.S. has already alleged Russia is moving in this direction. So very much something I'll be watching for, Jacko, in ongoing North Korean weapons development and testing activity. It's also something that I think concerns the entire world because the space environment, of course, is broadly exploited by a number of space-faring countries and space is only getting more crowded.

And so throwing a North Korean counter space capability into the mix has a lot of consequences. Last question for your anchor today. If we step back, when historians look at February March, 2026, will they see this current conference? conflict as primarily a regional Middle East conflict or is it a turning point in the global nuclear order? So I think the turning point in the global nuclear order already happened last year with Midnight Hammer. I wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times last year where I argued that, you know, the significance of a country like Iran that was once trying to build the bomb, gave up that ambition, had that certified by the IAEA and by the P5 Plus One, did a diplomatic deal,

and then had safeguarded facilities attacked by a non-NPT nuclear weapon state, Israel, and the United States, an NPT nuclear weapon state. That's had a really bad precedent in a number of ways. And, you know, I think that this war, again, a benefit of podcasting, because I'm probably going to say something that will be embarrassingly wrong when people listen to this podcast in a few days. But it's very difficult to imagine that this war fundamentally, I think, shifts the course of at least the Iranian approach to, you know, sustaining the set of

capabilities that it has in its nuclear arsenal. And by the way, well, not nuclear arsenal, it's nuclear capability. Iran does not have a nuclear arsenal. But what I just want to add is that there's obviously tremendous uncertainty about the political outcome here, what kind of regime will persist in Iran, will it be a revolutionary one, will it be some kind of pro-Western regime, will it be some kind of total political collapse and civil war situation? In all of those scenarios, the nuclear materials, the knowledge, the enrichment capabilities, all of that will continue to persist in Iran. And so the Iran nuclear question is not yet settled, right? And so there will be, I think, a need to figure out even after this war what happens fundamentally in the country.

And again, this is a massive country, right? Iran is a country of 90 million people, lots of territory, lots of nuclear facilities that were being expected and diplomatically dealt with that now, you know, that whole situation has been obviously blown open. Well, thank you, Ankapal. lot of food for thought there. I look forward to seeing you in person later on this month. Yeah, looking forward to seeing you in Seoul, Jacko, for a longer discussion, I hope. Looking to stay informed about South Korea's fast-evolving political business and cultural landscape? Join us on Korea Pro, the go-to resource for in-depth analysis expertly curated by top-tier professionals.

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