North Korea Tests AI-Guided Torpedo in Underwater Trial, State Media Says

SEOUL. North Korea said on Saturday that it has tested a new torpedo underwater, a high speed precision guided weapon that uses artificial intelligence to find and track its targets. State news agency KCNA reported the test on Saturday, two days after the weapon was fired, and called it a success and a significant step in the country's naval development.

KCNA named the weapon the Zam-2.0. It said the test on Thursday, October 15 was run to confirm a technical upgrade to the torpedo, and that senior defence officials who watched it judged it a great success that points to a significant change in how the navy will develop.

What Pyongyang claims the weapon can do

KCNA said artificial intelligence was applied to the torpedo's target detection and guidance functions, so the weapon can pick out a target and steer toward it. The agency said the test proved core technology for raising propulsion efficiency and the performance of the weapon's rocket propulsion system.

It also put a long history behind the trial. Related tests have been carried out more than 180 times over the past five years, KCNA said, as engineers worked on the propulsion system.

What KCNA did not give matters too. It published no range, no speed, no test location and no technical evidence for the AI claims. Nothing in the report can be checked independently, and it is not clear how much of the guidance is automatic or how well the weapon would work against a defended fleet.

A navy being rebuilt in public

The torpedo trial is the second North Korean naval test in three days. On Wednesday, October 14, Pyongyang test fired two types of submarine launched strategic cruise missiles in the East Sea, in what outside analysts believe were the first weapons trials of its 3,000 ton submarine Hero Kim Kun Ok.

North Korea has also commissioned two new 5,000 ton destroyers, Choe Hyon and Kang Kon, one for each coast. Together with work on modern missile submarines, the pattern is plain. The navy, long the weakest part of North Korea's military, is getting new hulls and new weapons at the same time.

KCNA described the torpedo work as part of routine defence research. It said the goal is stronger naval forces able to carry out the country's war deterrent mission from under the sea.

Both Koreas are racing

The test lands in the middle of an arms race on the peninsula. Last week South Korean President Lee Jae Myung oversaw the country's first test firing of a domestically built hypersonic glide vehicle, a weapon that can change course in flight to get past missile defences. Days earlier, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had overseen a test of an intermediate range hypersonic missile of the North's own.

On Friday the two sides were already arguing about the South's test. Pyongyang rejected Seoul's explanation of the glide vehicle's performance and used the South's weapons work to justify its own build up. Neither side shows any sign of slowing down.

For South Korea and the United States, an AI assisted torpedo raises a practical problem. Torpedoes that can search and correct their own course are harder to decoy and harder to track than older straight running weapons. Whether the Zam-2.0 is that weapon is still unproven. What is proven is the direction of travel.