We might not know if North Korea's claim to have set off a hydrogen bomb is true, but we can be sure of one thing — Kim Jong Un's rogue state has a
massive and very scary military.
The North Korean militar
y has690,000 active military personnel, 4,500,000 active reserve military personnel, and is heavily armed with aging but still deadly Soviet-era equipment.
Take a look at North Korea's military hardware below.
North Korea's ground forces are numerous but equipped mostly with out-of-date Soviet-era small arms, or copies produced by North Korea or China.
The air force has some semi-modern fighter jets, like the MiG-29, which was built in the later years of the Soviet Union, but most of its air force is made up of "less capable" jets and even biplanes.
North Korea's elderly air force would be easily outmatched by South Korea's, and the most threatening equipment belongs to other parts of the military.
One of the most threatening things in the North's arsenal is its powerful conventional artillery, with hundreds of these 170 mm Koksan guns threatening South Korea.
Some systems, like the 240 mm multiple-rocket launchers pictured, even have the capacity to hit Seoul, South Korea's capital.
And those are actually small in comparison with some of the massive fixed guns in place to fire on South Korean islands if a conflict breaks out.
Despite being "unsophisticated" and aging, North Korea's submarine force is one of the world's largest. A small submarine sank a South Korean ship in 2010, killing 46 seamen.
North Korea's navy is the smallest of its military branches, and the nonsubmarine part is made up mostly of "ageing, though numerous, small patrol craft," according to the Pentagon.
The launch of satellite-carrying Unha rockets is watched closely, since it's the same delivery system as North Korea's Taepodong-2 ballistic missile, which was tested successfully in December 2012.
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