The extravagant parades conducted semi-annually by North Korea serve as an important window into the DPRK’s newest weapons designs and future development plans. This is certainly true of their infamous ballistic missile program, as has been widely covered by media outlets across the world, but also of weaponry that is several orders of magnitude smaller in size: small arms.

Although these conventional hand-held weapons are a lot less intimidating and headline-grabbing than their WMD-carrying cousins, they too indicate a continuing trend of modernisation in the North Korean military. And indeed, in the 2017 parade new small arms