The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

North Korea

Uranium or plutonium? Plutonium or uranium? Kim Jong-un wanted the answer to be plutonium, and it would have been, too, if the Russians had kept their centrifugal promise, or if the only person in the northern hemisphere who was a bigger screw-up than the director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy in Pyongyang wasn’t his colleague at the plutonium plant in Yongbyon. What they had accomplished, at great cost to the Democratic People’s Republic, was certainly enough to be a slight annoyance to the Americans and their puppets scattered throughout the area, but it was far from anything that could demonstrate real might.

Therefore the Supreme Leader had first removed the plutonium director north of the capital, citing his incompetence – that is, treason. It was, of course, a correct decision, as were all decisions made by the Supreme Leader, but in practice it had not led to anything but the removed director being replaced by a man who essentially deserved the same. And the one in Pyongyang mostly kept slinking around with his back to the wall, terrified, for some reason.

All these things a person had to do himself. The Supreme Leader gave the order to purchase enriched uranium on the free market. Just three or four kilos to start. The purveyor the Russians had mentioned had to prove himself, and the method of smuggling had to be run in before any meaningful deliveries could be fulfilled. It would never do to obtain uranium for maybe a hundred million dollars, only to see the load seized by the devil himself.

A few kilos (or even half a ton) were far from sufficient to win a large-scale war, but that was never the intent. Naturally, Kim Jong-un realized that an attack on South Korea or Japan could not end in anything but destruction for all. More so if he reached the United States, or even just Guam.

At the same time, four kilos (unlike half a ton) was too little for the true purpose, which was to prove themselves and make the dogs in Washington drop their ideas about doing what they’d already done in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. History showed that countries that couldn’t bite back were devoured. A happy side effect of the armament was that it allowed for an ever-brasher rhetoric, which in turn brought local fighting spirit to entirely new levels. In this way, the Supreme Leader became even more supreme.

Deep down, Kim Jong-un didn’t believe in anything but himself, his dad and his grandpa. Religion in the wider sense was forbidden in North Korea. Yet he was close to thinking that a higher power was involved, in that the one person on earth he needed more than any other, for his purposes, had been found floating in a basket at sea just days before. Only to be scooped up by the very ship that was on its way home with the trial cargo of uranium. If this person was who he claimed to be, of course. That was a detail that remained to be investigated.

Anyway, scooped up he had been. And by a captain who proved able to think for himself. For that, the captain would be awarded a medal. And scrutinized a bit more closely by the director of Domestic Security. To think for himself. From there, it was a slippery slope towards planning a coup.

There was plenty of uranium out there, if you only had the contacts. And nowadays they did. Furthermore, Kim Jong-un also loved the fact that the main distributor of the necessary uranium was the director of a plant in Congo that had been created by the Americans.

The dream, of course, would be a hydrogen bomb, but for that they would need, first, a functional production line of plutonium (which, again, the screw-ups hadn’t yet managed to create) and then something totally, uniquely complicated where deuterium and tritium melted together into helium atoms at the same time as… something. Kim Jong-un’s brain was too valuable to the nation for him to weigh it down with the sort of thing his researchers ought to be able to manage in an afternoon.

The advantage of a hydrogen bomb was that it would erase Japan and South Korea from the map in a single bang. The disadvantage was that the Democratic People’s Republic would cease to exist thirty seconds later. But as long as malevolent Americans, Japanese and South Koreans didn’t completely understand that Kim Jong-un realized this, it would fulfil its function. If only it were possible to build.

The hydrogen bomb would have to wait. The plutonium facilities could continue not to deliver. Kim Jong-un had uranium on the way now – and, possibly, the man who knew the best way to make use of it.

All that was left to do was to let the world know.