North Korea will soon be able to deploy enough nuclear missiles to overcome US defences, a congressional report has warned.

The study released on Thursday by the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States gives an alarming assessment that the United States is militarily underprepared for simultaneous rising threats over the next decade from North Korea, Russia, China and Iran.

It highlights Pyongyang’s “aggressive” expansion of its missile programme, including “rapid, ambitious missile development and flight-testing” to refine its nuclear-armed arsenal capable of striking as far as the US mainland.

“Staying ahead of the North Korean missile threat to the homeland is a longstanding policy goal, to be pursued through ‘a comprehensive missile defeat approach’,” says the report.

More broadly it sounds the alarm bell that the US requires a radical overhaul of its own nuclear arsenal and strategic posture to be able to defend itself against potential threats on multiple fronts, including the prospect of facing Russia and China as two nuclear equals for the first time.

“To defend against a coercive attack from China or Russia, while staying ahead of the North Korean threat, the United States will require additional IAMD (Integrated Air and Missile Defence) capabilities,” it cautions.

“The risk of conflict with these two nuclear peers is increasing. It is an existential challenge for which the United States is ill-prepared, unless its leaders make decisions now.”

The report points to nearly 100 missile tests conducted by Kim Jong Un’s regime in 2022, placing South Korea and Japan under increasing pressure.

Tensions have spiralled on the Korean Peninsula since the collapse of denuclearisation talks in 2019.

On Friday, North Korea again raised the spectre of using nuclear weapons to defend itself after the arrival of the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier and its battle group in the southern South Korean port of Busan.

The battlegroup will dock for five days as part of an agreement to increase the temporary deployments of powerful US military assets in response to the North’s growing nuclear threat.

North Korean state media called it “an undisguised military provocation” and restated Pyongyang’s doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons that “allows the execution of necessary action procedures in case a nuclear attack is launched against it or it is judged that the use of nuclear weapons against it is imminent.”