M1989 Koksan

North Korea's monster gun — the M1989 Koksan is a 170mm self-propelled gun, the largest-caliber tube artillery in service anywhere, designed in the 1970s to range Seoul from behind the DMZ. It became a Ukraine-war weapon in late 2024, when trainloads were geolocated rolling west across Russia: Ukrainian intelligence counts 120 delivered and German reporting up to 200, backfilling Russia's attrited long-range artillery. Since early 2025 Koksans have fired on the Kursk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia axes — and Ukrainian drones and HIMARS have been methodically picking them off.

Overview

The M1989 Koksan is a North Korean 170mm self-propelled gun — an open, turretless mount on a tracked chassis, known in the DPRK as the Chuch'ep'o ("Juche gun"). "M1989" and "Koksan" are US designations: the year the improved variant was first observed, and the county where the original M1978 was first spotted. Its reason for existing is reach — roughly 40 km with conventional shells and 50–60 km with rocket-assisted projectiles, enough to strike Seoul from north of the DMZ, at the price of a very slow rate of fire (independent estimates: one to two rounds every five minutes). For decades it was a Korean-peninsula curiosity with one foreign combat record, Iran's use of exported M1978s in the Iran–Iraq War. That changed in November 2024, when OSINT analysts geolocated M1989s on Russian trains: the Koksan became the tube-artillery chapter of North Korea's arms pipeline to Moscow — after the shells and the KN-23 ballistic missiles — replacing losses in Russia's own long-range gun park, where the comparable 2S7 Pion/Malka fleet had been ground down. It is now the flagship case of DPRK hardware fighting, and dying, in Ukraine.

Development

The Koksan emerged from North Korea's state defense industry in the 1970s; US analysts first observed it in 1978 (hence "M1978"). The gun's origin is debated — Jane's Armour and Artillery editor Christopher Foss suggested a repurposed Soviet 170mm-class naval or coastal gun, while KPA specialist Joseph Bermudez assessed an indigenous design influenced by the German 17 cm Kanone 18 and Japanese Type 96 coastal cannon, per Wikipedia. The M1978 mated the gun to a turretless tank chassis with no onboard crew or ammunition space; the improved M1989, observed in 1989, moved to a longer artillery-tractor chassis with two armored crew cabs and 12 onboard rounds, per Army Recognition. Iran received M1978s in 1987 and used them in the Iran–Iraq War. The system's second life began in October–November 2024: on 14 November 2024 OSINT imagery geolocated M1989s on a train in Krasnoyarsk — the first hard evidence of transfer to Russia, per NK News and TWZ — with a second trainload filmed in December. Ukraine's HUR reported some guns routed to the Saratov Artillery Command School for crew training, and in January 2025 HUR chief Kyrylo Budanov told TWZ Russia had received 120 Koksans in three months with more expected; Germany's ZDF later put the total at up to 200, per The Moscow Times. By June 2025, NHK had obtained a Russian-language operating manual — evidence of formal Russian crew conversion.

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