North Korea Tests Zam-2.0 Super-Speed Torpedo It Says Uses Artificial Intelligence to Find Targets

North Korea has tested a new torpedo designated Zam-2.0, which state media describes as a super-speed precision-guided weapon applying artificial intelligence to both target detection and guidance. The state news agency KCNA announced the underwater trial on October 17, with South Korea’s Yonhap news agency placing it on October 15, a day after the country fired two types of strategic cruise missiles from a submarine. KCNA disclosed no figures for speed, range or warhead, named no launch platform and released no images of the weapon itself. The test was the second undersea weapons trial in as many days, and highlights how significantly Pyongyang’s priorities have shifted from ballistic missiles towards a navy able to threaten the South Korean fleet.

Officials who oversaw the trial described it to KCNA as “a great success foreseeing a significant change in the actual development of the Navy.” The agency stated that the test had proved the core technology for improving the torpedo’s propulsion and its rocket propulsion devices, which it said were developed through more than 180 rounds of related tests over five years. The announcement followed the launch of strategic cruise missiles from a presumed 3,000-ton submarine in the East Sea on October 14. Artificial intelligence has become a recurring theme in North Korea‘s weapons announcements, with Kim Yo Jong, sister of leader Kim Jong Un, having claimed that missiles tested on October 3 also used it. South Korea’s military, which this week rejected North Korean doubts over its own first hypersonic glide vehicle test and has frequently accused the North of exaggerating its capabilities, had not commented publicly on the torpedo claim when it was reported.

The term super-speed and the reference to rocket propulsion led South Korean experts cited by Yonhap to assess that the Zam-2.0 could be a supercavitating torpedo, which surrounds itself with a bubble of gas to cut water resistance. The Soviet VA-111 Shkval, in service since 1977, remains the best known example, leaving standard 533 millimetre tubes at around 50 knots before a solid-fuel rocket accelerates it beyond 200 knots over a maximum range of about 15 kilometres. That speed has historically come at a considerable cost, since the gas cavity makes course changes difficult and the rocket’s noise both reveals the launching submarine and deafens the weapon’s own sensors. Sonar guidance at full supercavitating speed has widely been considered impractical for that reason, and several analysts doubt that Pyongyang’s references to artificial intelligence describe more than improved guidance software.

Lim Eul-chul of Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies assessed that the test was meant to showcase a weapon that is hard to detect or evade and aimed at the South Korean Navy’s major surface ships. Shin Jong-woo of the Korea Defense and Security Forum described the program as an effort to close the gap with the South Korean Navy as the North’s submarine force expands and its first 5,000-ton destroyers, the Choe Hyon and Kang Kon, enter service. A South Korean-led international investigation concluded on May 20, 2010, that the corvette ROKS Cheonan had been sunk near Baengnyeong Island two months earlier by a North Korean CHT-02D torpedo, killing 46 of the 104 sailors aboard, a finding Pyongyang has always denied.