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Some images might look silly, but they can be rich with insights into the country’s military and politics. By using high-tech forensics and traditional detective work, analysts and intelligence agencies can use photos to track North Korea’s internal politics and expanding weapons programs with stunning granularity.

Several experts walked us through a photo of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, unveiling what he claimed was a new nuclear device. But the image, from March 2016, may show more than Kim intended: the possible range of the missile behind him, his relationship with the military, even his precise location.

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— The Bomb

North Korea calls the object in the photo its first miniaturized nuclear warhead, small enough to fit on a missile. Analysts call it the disco ball.

Jeffrey Lewis, an analyst at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, used the photo to estimate the device’s size, from which he deduced its weight — a few hundred kilograms — and its destructive yield, about 20 kilotons, roughly equivalent to the atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Japan.