Pokpung-ho
ropiendo el aire
The P'okp'ung-ho (Korean: 폭풍호), officially the Chonma-215 and Chonma-216 are North Korean main battle tanks (MBT) developed in the 1990s. The tank may incorporate technology found in the T-62, T-72, and Ch'onma-ho MBTs. Outside parties codename the tank M-2002 because the tank went through performance trials on February 16, 2002 (therefore being officially confirmed by outside sources), although the tank may have been in existence since 1992.
The P'okp'ung-ho is only known to be used in North Korea.
Origin
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a significant number of T-72s were decommissioned from Soviet service and scrapped for metal. North Korea is believed to have acquired some of these scrapped T-72s and obtained core technology for use on the P'okp'ung-ho through reverse engineering. It is also believed North Korea acquired three samples of T-80 in early 1990s from Afghanistan. North Korea's interest in the T-90 was demonstrated in August 2001 when Kim Jong-il visited the Omsktransmash defense plant which builds the T-90 during his visit to Russia. However, North Korea failed to acquire T-90 since then, as South Korean and Russian governments agreed to cease supplying arms technology to North Korea since 1994.
The destruction of Iraqi T-72s by western tanks such as the M1 Abrams during the Gulf War demonstrated the poor combat performance of the older export variants of T-72s against top-of-the-line Western models.
“Pokpung-ho” enters the record as ropiendo el aire. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pokpung-ho, ropiendo and aire can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Pokpung-ho” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Pokpung-ho, ropiendo and aire provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q707710. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2002, 1992, 2001 and 1994.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pokpung-ho” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.