Known nuclear tests by regional nuclear powers: India: 6 Pakistan: 6 North Korea: 6 Israel: 0 or 1 South Africa: 0 DPRK can probably stop where it is and still be fine.
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This boils down to “what does it take to deter?” For my money, 200kT is enough. North Korea had a sequence too, whereas India and Pakistan did not. They are probably in a better position than either of those two.
I had a long talk some years ago with someone connected to the US nuke testing world. He told me that he and his colleagues had concluded that you could get reasonably high confidence with very few tests if you had OK computer models and knew what you were looking for.
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He even thought you could get away with reasonably OK confidence without testing at all. He noted that in the global history of nuclear testing the number of actual fizzles is very small and mostly reserved for high-risk/unusual designs (e.g. LLNL's hydride bombs).
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I give you RSA and Israel.
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Right, I mean, we know they haven't tested (much???), but the question is how much confidence you could have. Part of the Nixon admin "bargain" with Israel was that without testing, you couldn't REALLY be thought of as a nuclear power b/c of low confidence in capability.
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(Which was always a fig-leaf argument, to be sure. But I also think increases in cheap computation make this argument especially unconvincing today in a way it might not have been in 1960s-1970s.)
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(If you want to be scared/impressed by what some clever physicists can do with cloud computation and some knowledge of open-source info about nukes, check out
@rscottkemp 's more recent work!)
End of conversation
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