Forget Nuclear Weapons: North Korea's Old Type 73 Machine Gun Is the Real Killer

Joseph Trevithick

Security, Asia

A gun seen all around the world.

Key point: Pyongyang sells all kinds of things, including weapons, to generate much-needed cash.

Between February and March 2016, Australian and French sailors in the Arabian Sea seized small ships — or dhows — smuggling weapons, most likely to militants in Somalia and Yemen. These caches aboard the dhows included examples of one particularly rare firearm, the North Korean Type 73 machine gun.

In November 2016, independent monitoring group Conflict Armament Research released a report detailing the captured weapons and their likely points of origins and destinations. According to the analysis, the shipments showed links between Iran and armed groups Tehran supports in the Gulf of Aden region.

“The presence of large consignments of weapons on board the dhows, a significant proportion of which were manufactured in Iran … suggests that Iranian entities may have been involved in the supply of these weapons,” the researchers concluded.

“Furthermore, the presence of materiel in Yemen with matching lot numbers and displaying the same serial number sequence … supports the assertion that materiel on board the dhows was ultimately destined for Yemen, and likewise, that the materiel recovered in Yemen probably originated in Iran.”

But it may be the odd North Korean guns that are actually the clearest indicator of an Iranian connection. Since 2015, these weapons have been turning up on battlefields from Yemen all the way to Iraq.

The Type 73 is an intriguing design, virtually unheard of outside North Korea. Little information about the gun’s origins has escape the reclusive communist country.

“Even within the mist of secrecy regarding North Korean firearms, the Type 73 is still clouded in mystery,” Dan Shea and Heebum Hong wrote in Small Arms Defense Journal in 2013. “Refugees who escape North Korea via China sometimes have information, but that information might have some problems.”