North Korea has built a new slipway 170 meters long and 30 meters wide in its shipyard in the city of Nampo, the construction of the facility started in May 2024. With the appearance of this object, the North Korean Juche regime will be able to build an extraordinarily powerful ship by its standards, but there is still no understanding of what kind of ship it might be, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) notes in The Military Balance Blog.
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Available satellite images show that North Korea is already building a ship on this slipway, in particular, you can see what looks like hull sections painted with a red oxide primer. Two gantry cranes can also be seen, which can be used to move hull sections along the slipway.
However, since the North Koreans covered the frame with a mesh net over the slipway, any closer look at the construction of this ship is impossible with satellite images only.
Another interesting detail is that the shipyard in the North Korean city of Nampo essentially has a dual purpose: civilian vessels were built there, but two Amnok-class missile corvettes as well, which are currently the most powerful warships of the DPRK Navy.
For comparison, the mentioned Amnok corvettes are believed to have a displacement of 1,500 tons and a hull length of 80 meters. With that in mind, a whole 170-meter-long slipway should be for a huge new vessel, and the IISS experts provide two possible explanations of its purpose.
The first assumption is that the North Korean regime has the ambition to build a more powerful surface ship for its Navy, such as the "missile frigate" class, and the second hypothesis is that the DPRK wants to use this facility to build a new ballistic missile carrier submarine.
Against this background, Defense Express reminds of recent reports claiming that North Korea receives "submarine missile-launch systems" from russia, according to Ukrainian intelligence. The context hints that russia might have a role in this new huge ship project.
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