Advert for North Korea’s nuclear strength
THE online ad reads like something only a metallurgist could love: an offer to sell 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of highly pure lithium-6 every month, set for delivery from the port of Dandong, China.
But it caught the attention of intelligence agencies around the world for a simple reason: Lithium-6 offers a fast way to turn an ordinary atom bomb into a hydrogen bomb, magnifying its destructive power by up to 1,000 times. The seller listed in the ad – who even provided his cellphone number – was identified in a recent United Nations report as the third secretary in the North Korean Embassy in Beijing.
When President Donald Trump meets with President Xi Jinping in Florida this week, administration officials say, his top agenda item will be pressing China to sign on to the most powerful set of economic sanctions ever imposed on North Korea over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. Trump has repeatedly vowed to stop the North’s nuclear efforts, telling the Financial Times in an interview published on Sunday: “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all that I am telling you.”
But experts say the offer to sell excess lithium is evidence that North Korea has produced so much of the precious material that it is too late to prevent the nation from becoming an advanced nuclear power.
If that is the case, Trump may find little success in borrowing from the playbook of the four presidents before him, who fruitlessly tried, with differing mixes of negotiations, sanctions, sabotage and threats of unilateral strikes, to force the North to give up its program. And it remains unclear exactly what the president meant when he said he would “solve” the problem of North Korea.
While experts doubt the declaration last year by Kim Jong-un, the North’s leader, that the country had tested a hydrogen bomb, intelligence estimates provided to Trump in recent weeks say the mercurial young ruler is working on it. The acceleration of Kim’s atomic and missile programs – the North launched four ballistic missiles in a test last month – is meant to prove that the country is, and will remain, a nuclear power to be reckoned with.
For Trump, that reckoning is coming even as his strategy to halt the North’s program remains incomplete and largely unexplained, and as some experts say the very idea of stopping Pyongyang’s efforts is doomed to failure. Trump’s budget is expected to include more money for anti-missile defences, and officials say he is continuing a cyberand electronic-warfare effort to sabotage North Korea’s missile launches.
The president’s insistence that he will solve the North Korea problem makes it hard to imagine a shift towards acceptance of its arsenal. But in private, even some of his closest aides have begun to question whether the goal of “complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament” – the policy of the Obama and Bush administrations – is feasible anymore.
“We need to change the fundamental objective of our policy, because North Korea will never willingly give up its program,” Michael J Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, and James A Winnefeld Jr, a retired admiral and a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote last week on the website the Cipher Brief.
“Washington’s belief that this was possible was a key mistake in our initial policy thinking,” added the two men, experienced hands at countering the North. The United States and China, they argue, should abandon the idea of denuclearising the Korean Peninsula and turn to old-fashioned deterrence.
Similarly, Robert Einhorn, a former senior State Department nonproliferation expert, writes in a new report for the Brookings Institution that a “dual-track strategy involving both pressure and negotiations” would be more likely to “bring China on board”. The technique is reminiscent of what was used to push Iran into nuclear talks. But Einhorn cautioned that “while the complete denuclearization of North Korea would be the ultimate goal of negotiations, there is virtually no prospect that it could be achieved in the near term”.
The Chinese appear unlikely to make more than token efforts to squeeze North Korea, fearing the repercussions if the regime were to collapse, and Kim has made it clear that he is not about to negotiate away what he sees as his main protection against being overthrown by the United States and its allies.
As Trump and Xi meet on Thursday and Friday, Kim, on the other side of the world, may have a plan of his own for the summit meeting: Satellite photographs suggest he is preparing for a sixth nuclear test. Workers have dug a deep tunnel, which can block radioactive leaks if carefully sealed, leaving intelligence experts struggling to estimate the North’s progress.
As for the excess lithium-6, any interested buyers may have a hard time answering the ad. The street address given in the advertisement does not exist. The phone has been disconnected or no one answers. But if the operation really is being run out of the North Korean Embassy in Beijing, it should not be hard for Xi to find out: It is about 5 kilometres down the road from the compound where he lives.