Useful Notes / North Koreans with Nodongs
Must be out of ammunition again.

From triumph to triumph!
O Leadership of the Revolution!
Thousands of lives become guns and shells,
Ready to defend you!
North Korean patriotic song, "We Will Safeguard the Leadership of the Revolution with Desperate Courage!"

The Korean People's Army was formed from Kim Il-sung's Korean guerrillas allied with the Soviet Union (and led by the latter) in 1932. By the time of Korea's liberation from the Japanese in 1945, the guerrilla force had been transformed into a well-equipped army, to the point of enabling them to invade South Korea in 1950. Although they were beaten back by a United Nations force spearheaded by none other than Yanks with Tanks, the KPA eventually recovered due to intervention by the Chinese with Chopper Supportnote  and, to a lesser degree, the Reds with Rockets.

North Korea is the most militarized country in the world today; they have the third-largest army in the world behind China and America, with about a fifth of its able-bodied men in the military and the rest in the reserve or WPRG and over 30% of national GDP going to military expenses. It has a Worker and Peasant Guard as a paramilitary, numbering 3 to 5 million (though they are mostly armed with World War II Weaponry), a relatively huge, if outdated, weapons industry, and has its countryside dotted with bases of all sorts. This has led to the saying that North Korea isn't a country with a military, it's a military with a country.

North Korea also developed its own weapons industry, starting with the Nodong missile (the Trope Namer), and eventually nuclear weapons, cheating the United Nations inspectors in their "peaceful" quest for nuclear energy. In 1994, the U.S. and North Korea signed a treaty intended to halt the North's nuclear program in return for the lifting of sanctions, with the Clinton administration operating under the assumption that North Korea would collapse anyway following the death of Kim Il-sung. Once that did not happen, and once the Republican party gained control of the U.S. Congress and opposed the treaty, believing it to be tantamount to appeasement, the deal broke down.

Of course, Kim Jong-un is the Commander in Chief, in his capacity as Chairman of the National Defense Commission. The Korean Worker's Party also has control over the KPA to ensure that no one in the army will challenge Kim. Though technically, the Commander in Chief of the KPA is still Kim Il-sung, as he was declared "Eternal President", followed by his second in command Kim Jong-il, "Eternal Chairman of the National Defence Commission". Both of these people are dead, by the way.

The North Korean People's Army is composed of the KPA Ground Force, the Korean People's Navy, and the Korean People's Air Force, plus the Korean People's Strategic Rocket Forces (Formerly known as the Artillery Guidance Bureau) which handles North Korea's nuclear missiles...meaning that they emulated the PRC's military structure. The People's Republic of China is also their biggest foreign provider of materiel and has been allied with them since 1961. The North Korean military has built a network of underground facilities around the country in the event of an attack.

Korean People's Ground Forces:

The KPA has approximately 1 million personnel with a mix of mechanized, armored, and artillery units. They have one of the largest collections of armored vehicles, having over twice the number of armored vehicles than its local adversaries. However, though they have numbers over the South Koreans, they still have to work with Cold War era equipment. Even though they've tried to aggressively upgrade their equipment, it's still mostly obsolete compared to the South Koreans and their American allies.

The KPA also has the largest special forces organization of any army in the world, with over 90,000 personnel. They are trained specifically to fight in North Korea's notoriously mountainous terrain. They've also historically been very successful in covert incursions into the South's territory using the tunnels dug under the DMZ.

As far as equipment goes the KPAGF has some modern weaponry like Type 88 Assault Rifles (a AK-74 clone) with awesome helical magazines and Pokpung-Ho tanks. And on the other hand they have some ancient weaponry T-34-85 tanks and PPSH-41 Submachine guns in reserve.

Korean People's Navy

The KPN is the lowest priority of the North Korean armed forces, and hence the least funded and advanced. Their entire navy, barring the submarine forces, is essentially an obsolete brown-water flotilla, consisting of small, aging boats that cannot go out more than 50 nautical miles from the coast. However, these small craft do excel at covert insertions for special forces, and their submarine fleet is notably better than their surface navy. The KPN is also known for having a large stockpile of sea mines, and it's generally assumed that they will be used liberally to fend off potential amphibious assaults. The Navy itself is divided into two separate fleets, East and West, but neither fleet is in a position to support the other. The North Korean navy mainly exists to guard the flanks of the ground force rather than to conduct its own offensive operations.

The North Korea has been known to use the KPN to aggressively patrol its waters, especially in the contested waters near the 38th parallel, an issue that has yet to resolved. KPN ships have been known to attack and capture ships that dare venture too close, regardless of nationality.

Korean People's Air Force

Like the KPA and KPN, the KPAF does not lack in quantity but has serious issues with quality. The majority of their 1700 aircraft (though estimates put the number at closer to 940) are Cold War era relics, which only roughly 400 more modern fighters acquired from Russia and China. Their most advanced air-to air fighter is the Mig-29U/B fighter from the 1990s, purchased from Russia. The KPAF only possess 30 such planes and since it is incredibly valuable to the KPAF, only the best pilots are allowed to fly it and the plane is given the important task of defending Pyongyang's airspace. The most numerous and widely fielded fighter in the KPAF inventory is the Mig-21PFM, a fighter from the 1950s and 1960s. They even have a number of biplane transports that they favor because they can be operated from short, improvised landing strips and are notoriously hard to detect on radar. KPAF military doctrine is mostly based off the old Soviet air doctrine, as well as their experiences with American heavy bombing during the Korean War. As a result, the KPAF is mostly concerned with air defence, mostly consisting of fighters and interceptors. This is complemented by the world's densest air defence network, with some 12,000 Anti-Aircraft Guns, up to 1000 heavy SAM's, mobile SAM sites, radar facilities and some 17,000 Man Portable Air Defence systems. The North Koreans may lack in sophistication when it comes to air defense, but they make up for it with brute force and sheer quantity. The KPAF also operates hidden underground bases and airfields built into mountains. Satellite imagery shows runways leading into mountainsides all around the country, meant to hide aircraft from sight and attack.

North Korean Nukes

There was much debate as to whether North Korea has nukes or not, until they've finally demonstrated that yes, they do have them, in the early Oughts. Apparently, there were several false starts, including the very first genuine nuclear test that seemed to "fizzle"note , but now they seem to be on track. This pretty much surprised a lot of people, as the general consensus was that North Korea lacks the resources and technology to create a fully functional nuclear device, and that technology gap was projected to close much later.

Still, it looks like their nukes are representative of the Fifties technology that was used to create them, and thus are very bulky and heavy, severely limiting the delivery options. KPAF lacks heavy bombers that could deliver these unwieldy devices to their targets, and these bombers stay little chance against ROK's air defense anyway. TBMs like Scud could be adapted to carry them, and apparently early Taepodong missiles were just that, but they are limited in distance and could barely hit Japan. That's why they are now mostly used as a bargaining chips, with North threatening to conduct a nuclear test each time its foreign relations deteriorate.

North Korea has two missiles that could potentially be used as ICBMs, the Nodong and improved versions of Taepodong rockets, to use their US Reporting Names, in reference to their first spotting location. However, the reliability of these rockets is much debated (the Unha orbital launcher, which failed spectacularly each time it launched,note  is almost universally considered to be a barely-modified Taepodong-2). To be honest, thought, failures are pretty normal during testing of the new rockets, and it's not that the North has had many opportunities to test them, given the international pressure. So the rocket launches ended up in the same "bargaining chip threats" bin as the nuclear tests.

...Or not as the case may be. On the 12th of December 2012, North Korea finally succeeded in putting a satellite in orbit. Their three-stage missile flew south over the Yellow Sea and Okinawa before debris crashed into the sea northeast of the Philippines. Seriously though, either this is the last in a long bout of saber rattling, or a sign that North Korea is developing a ballistic delivery system to strike at the west coast of the United States. Or a reminder that even the most unreliable missiles can work properly sometimes.

North Korean military in fiction:

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  • In general, North Korea tends to get used as a placeholder for the Chinese, typically when the story's already been written and the bean counters come in and point out China is a really big market that will blacklist them if they offend Beijing's delicate sensibilities. Whenever you see a modern/near-future North Korea that's a credible military threat, it's a safe bet that they're China with the serial numbers filed off.


  • Plenty of movies from South Korea deal with the North Korean military.
    • Shiri was one of the country's highest-grossing films in 2001, dealing with South Korean intelligence agents attempting to track down and eliminate a North Korean spy.
    • Joint Security Area is about a United Nations fact-finding mission investigating a shooting incident at a small border outpost on the DMZ, where a North Korean officer was shot dead on the northern border and a South Korean soldier from a counterpart outpost is the prime suspect.
    • Tae-guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War is a 2004 film and is the biggest budget film ever made about The Korean War. It centers on a pair of brothers who are drafted into the South Korean military and shipped off to fight on the frontlines from 1950 - 1953.
  • North Korea is featured in the James Bond film Die Another Day.
  • Red Dawn (2012) remake involves this plot. And you thought China invading the US was implausible.
  • World War III Breaks Out, a supposedly lost Japanese flick, features an alternate history where North Korea sparks an Apocalypse How by causing a nuclear war between America and themselves.
  • The 2007 Japanese thriller Midnight Eagle centers around an American strategic bomber carrying a nuclear payload that has crashed in the Hida Mountains as a result of sabotage. Interestingly, the film never, ever mentions North Korea by name (only referring to the enemy as "foreign agents"), but it's very obvious to anyone with even the barest understanding of East Asian international relations that the saboteurs are North Koreans after seeing them in action. This may have been because of media regulations: a similar situation happened with the Japanese release of Homefront.
  • The Cold Open of G.I. Joe: Retaliation features the Joes smuggling a defector out of North Korea.
  • The second Behind Enemy Lines film centers around the real-life Ryanggang explosion in Sept. 2004 and attributes it to U.S. Navy SEAL Team One sabotaging a nuclear missile there.
  • The Interview dealt with a talk show host and his show producer who're tasked with assassinating Kim Jong-Un during the titular interview.
  • Olympus Has Fallen deals with North Korean terrorists invading the White House.


  • Red Phoenix by Larry Bond.
  • The online novel Proud Legions by John F. Antal, with a plot not all that dissimilar from that of Red Phoenix.

     Live Action TV  

  • Naturally, they show up every so often in M*A*S*H.

     Video Games  

     Web Comics  

  • One of Spinnerette's major villains, and a VERY important figure in MechaMaid's backstory, is a KPA Colonel with telekinetic control over any and all forms of glass named, fittingly enough, Col. Glass.

Heh heh...No Dongs. Now they have some Type o' Dong.

Alternative Title(s): North Koreans With Nodongs