Eight Lessons for North Korea’s Nuclear and Missile Forces From the Ongoing Iran Conflict

The US/Israel conflict with Iran that started in late February illustrates some important potential lessons applicable to North Korea’s nuclear and missile forces. Although we have not yet seen any public commentary from Pyongyang on what it is learning from the war or the steps it might take in response, and we may never see this kind of messaging, assessing key aspects of the ongoing Epic Fury operation given the North’s strategic situation and force posture results in eight key lessons for its nuclear and missile forces. These include the value of retaining nuclear weapons and the risks of US military buildups, the need to address leadership and road-mobile missile vulnerabilities, and the effectiveness of US and allied air operations and missile defenses. It also strongly underscores the need for the North to have larger conventional missile stockpiles and to bolster its drone and counter-drone capabilities. Pyongyang should be able to address the eight lessons outlined below using programs and capabilities already underway, but will need to further increase holdings of the associated weapons systems, as well as reexamine and update some important command/control and operational procedures and concepts, to be more effective in a future conflict.

Eight Lessons

Lesson 1: Nuclear weapons provide real protection. Many analysts have assessed that the Iran case shows North Korea the value of deployed nuclear weapons in deterring potential attacks from the United States, underscoring what Pyongyang probably concluded from US attacks on Libya in 2011 and earlier strikes on Iran in June 2025. It also has been widely observed that the Iran case reinforces Kim Jong Un’s oft-stated position over the past few years that he will not negotiate away his nuclear arsenal.

A nuclear force in being certainly has to appear more protective to the North than the nuclear “hedging” strategy that clearly failed for Tehran. Moreover, North Korea has gone beyond merely possessing nuclear weapons to being able to use them against US bases and allies in South Korea and Japan, and then to obtaining since 2017 an increasing ability to directly threaten all of the US homeland with nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). That said, the North also was able to dissuade the US from destroying its nuclear program in 1994 through its ability to inflict massive damage on the nearby city of Seoul with conventional artillery, potentially augmented by an assessed large chemical weapons capability—factors that persist for North Korea that Iran did not have.

Lesson 2: US military buildups may presage an attack. The ongoing Iran operation depended on the assemblage in the Middle East over a period of about a month of US naval and air assets from the continental US and elsewhere in the world, to augment those forces already in the region. Similar buildups preceded the US June 2025 Iran and January 2026 Venezuela operations. Pyongyang probably judges that the US would need to conduct a similar buildup to mount and sustain a substantial attack against North Korea, and to help deal with any resulting retaliation or escalation. The Iran case probably amplifies the North’s longstanding propensity (at least in its public statements, including as recently as March 10) to regard any ongoing US regional buildup—even ostensibly for exercises—as the potential precursor for an attack. This may add to instability if North Korean force posture upgrades in reaction to US force buildups become mutually reinforcing. The apparent US need for such a buildup also may heighten Pyongyang’s incentive to conduct any desired offensive actions before the US is able to finish building up forces in the region, and to target assets in Northeast Asia able to host and support incoming US forces.

Lesson 3: Protect the leadership and have decapitation fallbacks. North Korea probably already started updating and refining its leadership protection protocols, and its contingency plans for conducting military operations when higher headquarters are lost or disconnected, in the wake of successful Israeli leadership strikes in the Middle East over the past few years and the US incursion to capture Venezuelan President Maduro. Israeli/US efforts to decapitate Iran’s civil and military leadership in the current conflict almost certainly underscored the need for such preparations.

That said, North Korea has long had to cope with the risk and consequences of decapitation strikes, and in particular since at least 2016 with South Korea’s public posturing about being prepared to use such attacks to offset Pyongyang’s possession of nuclear weapons. These threats probably have been a major driver of North Korea’s own public posturing over the past several years about both “preempting preemption” to thwart such attacks, and about the robustness and even automaticity of the North’s nuclear retaliation in case of such an attack.

Lesson 4: Expect to lose airspace control. The US and Israeli ability to operate with relative freedom and very low losses over Iran in both June 2025 and early 2026, despite Tehran’s possession of some higher-end Soviet-supplied air defense systems, probably underscores for North Korea the difficulty of being able to control its airspace in wartime and the need to try to conduct military operations without adequate air defense. Although the North is continuing to try to improve its air defense capabilities, at least in one case with Russian assistance, the Iran conflict highlights the difficulty of offsetting US and allied airpower. North Korea is likely to continue to cope by emphasizing its ability to attack allied airbases to suppress air operations, to employ electronic warfare to degrade the accuracy of air-delivered munitions, and to protect assets against the consequences of air attack through camouflage, concealment, decoys/deception, and hardened facilities.

Lesson 5: Do more to protect road-mobile missiles. North Korea critically relies on road-mobile launchers to protect its ballistic and cruise missile forces, and historically field-dispersed and camouflaged mobile launchers have been highly survivable even when the adversary has air superiority. Israel and the US, however, claim to have destroyed hundreds of Iranian road-mobile ballistic and cruise missile launchers in the 2025 and 2026 operations so far, taking advantage of their ability to penetrate and operate within Iranian airspace and impressive intelligence capabilities. We do not know how Iran postured its missile force in the run-up to these operations (e.g., how much of it was hunkered down in hardened facilities, how much of the force was dispersed and hidden out in the field, how well it was camouflaged, etc.), and so it is difficult to know what lessons North Korea might draw for its own road-mobile force.

But Pyongyang is highly likely to review its mobile missile operations considering the Iran experience. It is possible, given what appear to have been successful attacks on Iran’s underground “missile cities,” that North Korea will build or use many more smaller bunkers that its road-mobile missiles can be spread across in wartime. It also is likely to deploy more mobile launcher decoys and increase the number of mobile launchers in its inventory (a priority for Kim Jong Un since at least January 2024). Pyongyang may also be more tempted to start field-deploying its road-mobile missiles during US military buildups in the region (see above), or at an earlier stage in crises, in order to get a jump on improving force survivability; this may itself be seen by the US or South Korea as an escalatory move.

Lesson 6: Expect effective allied theater missile defenses. The 2026 Iran operation almost certainly underscored for North Korea that US-made theater missile defense systems such as Patriot and THAAD (as well as Israel’s Arrow and David’s Sling) are highly effective in real-world intercept engagements, adding to lessons from the 2025 Iran operation and the Ukraine war. North Korean solid-propellant short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) already have substantial capabilities to complicate theater missile defenses because they can fly lower (depressed) trajectories and fly mostly within the atmosphere, permitting extensive use of maneuvers to throw off intercept calculations. The North has long been assessed to be able to employ early-release submunitions to allow such payloads to be dispensed before the parent booster can be engaged by missile defense, as in the case of some of Iran’s ongoing missile attacks.

Pyongyang is most likely to react to the successes of allied missile defenses by structuring any missile attacks to overwhelm the engagement capability of individual launch sites at given points in time, and to preferentially attack missile defense radars needed to support intercepts (as Iran currently is doing) and the interceptor launchers themselves. It also is likely to increase its reliance on combined attacks using both ballistic and land-attack cruise missiles (LACMs) to stress defenses, probably throwing in less sophisticated drones as well. The North might take up Russia’s example and use penetration aids (decoys, jammers, etc.) on its SRBMs to confuse missile defenses at the cost of payload weight that could be used for weapons. It also is continuing work to develop hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) offering substantially greater maneuverability if the technical challenges can be overcome.

Lesson 7: Increase missile stocks. The current Iran operation offers yet another object lesson that modern conventional warfare entails unexpectedly high expenditures of ammunition—including missiles—amplifying the lessons of the war in Ukraine. North Korea already has been bolstering its capability to produce solid-propellant missiles and road-mobile launchers, and showcasing deployments of additional SRBM launchers. The North is highly likely to want even more missiles in inventory to help mitigate the increased threat to mobile missile launchers and demonstrated effectiveness of allied theater missile defenses seen in Iran (see above), and to increase its ability to sustain damaging attacks at higher rates of intensity through what could be a prolonged conflict. Increasing Pyongyang’s own missile inventories while still supporting Russia in its war with Ukraine (and now probably without Moscow getting more missiles from Iran) may impose an interesting balancing act.

Lesson 8: Benefit from and cope with low-end drones. Its presence on the Ukraine war battlefield already has taught North Korea the value of adding numerous small battlefield drones and low-end one-way theater-range attack drones like the Iranian Shahed-136 into its arsenal. The current Iran operation shows that sufficient stocks of the latter types of drones can add to the number of targets that can be struck, complicate air defenses (including by diverting air defense assets away from more capable attacking SRBMs and LACMs), and offer more dispersed and survivable deployment and launch options. North Korea is already working to expand production of both types of drones, probably in part with assistance from Russia.

The Iran case also shows the threat those same types of drones pose to North Korea when used by the alliance, which itself has been learning the lessons of Ukraine and adding drones to its arsenals. Just as the US and its allies have been increasing efforts to develop defenses against the drone threat (including from North Korea), the Iran case underscores the importance of North Korea bolstering its own drone defenses.

The Bottom Line

North Korea likely has taken away a number of important lessons from the ongoing Iran conflict to apply to its nuclear and missile forces and their operations. Most of these lessons probably underscore those able to be learned from earlier conflicts, especially Ukraine and the June 2025 Israel/US Iran operation. Pyongyang should be able to address these lessons using programs and capabilities already under way, but will need to further increase holdings of the associated weapons systems and reexamine and update some important command/control and operational procedures and concepts.