The online advertisement reads like something only a metallurgist could love: an offer to sell 10kg of highly pure lithium-6 every month, set for delivery from Dandong, China.
However, 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 UN report as the third secretary in the North Korean embassy in Beijing.
When US President Donald Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Florida tomorrow, 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.
‘TOO LATE’
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.”
However, 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 might find little success in borrowing from the playbook of the four US presidents before him, who fruitlessly tried, with differing mixes of negotiations, sanctions, sabotage and threats of unilateral strikes, to force North Korea to give up its program, and it remains unclear exactly what the US president meant when he said he would “solve” the problem of North Korea.
While experts doubt the declaration last year by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that the country had tested a hydrogen bomb, intelligence estimates provided to Trump say the mercurial young ruler is working on it.
The acceleration of Kim’s atomic and missile programs — North Korea 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 North Korea’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 funds for anti-missile defenses, and officials say he is continuing a cyber and electronic warfare effort to sabotage North Korea’s missile launches.
POLICY QUESTIONED
Trump’s insistence that he will solve the North Korea problem makes it hard to imagine a shift toward 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 followed by the administrations of former US presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush — is feasible anymore.
“We need to change the fundamental objective of our policy, because North Korea will never willingly give up its program,” former CIA deputy director Michael Morell, and retired US admiral and former vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff James Winnefeld Jr last week wrote on the Web site 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 North Korea.
The US and China should abandon the idea of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and turn to old-fashioned deterrence, they said.
Similarly, former senior US Department of State non-proliferation expert Robert Einhorn wrote 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 negotiations.
However, “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,” Einhorn said.
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 US and its allies.
“China will either decide to help us with North Korea, or they won’t,” Trump said in the Financial Times interview.
If the Chinese fail to act, he added: “It won’t be good for anyone.”
It is unclear how close North Korea is to constructing a hydrogen bomb, but Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford University professor who once directed the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico and has visited North Korea’s main nuclear complex, said the advertisement for lithium-6, while surprising, was a reminder that North Korea, though a backward country, is still capable of major technical advances.
“I can’t imagine they’re not working on true thermonuclear weapons,” Hecker said in an interview.
PREPARATIONS
As Trump and Xi meet tomorrow, Kim, on the other side of the world, might 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 North Korea’s progress.
US intelligence officials, and their South Korean and Japanese counterparts, are debating whether the next blasts will mark major steps down the road to a true thermonuclear weapon.
As for the excess lithium-6, any interested buyers might have a hard time answering the ad.
The street address given in the advertisement does not exist. The telephone has been disconnected or no one answers.
However, 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 4km down the road from the compound where he lives.
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