The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man (The Hundred-Year-Old Man #2)(11)

North Korea


Kim Jong-un had never asked to be the person he became. In fact, two older brothers were ahead of him in line, but one sealed his fate when he took his family under his wing and sneaked out of the country under a fake name to go to Tokyo for a lark. To Disneyland, to boot – he was 0 for 2. And their father, Kim Jong-il, considered his other son far too weak. That basically meant he was suspected of being gay. Here and there, it was considered questionable to love whomever you wished.

Their father Kim was quite advanced in age when he took over from Eternal President Kim Il-sung, and likely had plans for a similar run-in period for his youngest son. But the problem with life is that people both high and low die when they die. Suddenly there he was, the twenty-five-year-old son, expected to move forward the legacy of his just-deceased father. Or preferably further than that since his father had gone down in history as the man who had turned a hungry people into a starving people.

In the span of a few months, young Kim went from capable Game Boy player to three-star general. He wasn’t given terrific chances by international analysts. A puppy, commander of a series of battle-scarred officers, including the puppy’s own uncle? Surely that would never work out.

And it didn’t. For the uncle and the generals. It’s possible that they were scheming, but before they could finish they were purged, every last one. Young Kim proved to be a person not to be trifled with or herded about. The uncle was sentenced to death for, among other things, being unfaithful to his wife. Nowhere in the twelve-page verdict was there a word about the fact that young Kim’s father had had five children with three different women.

Several years earlier young Kim had attended school in Switzerland under a secret name while his mother travelled around Europe to shop for the sorts of things the average North Korean had never even seen a picture of. Kim was more interested in basketball and videogames than girls, but his grades were nothing to sneeze at. And when he hastily, and with a decent amount of enthusiasm, took over the entire nation his grandfather had created and his father had partially ruined, it was his grandfather he took after. He was an extrovert, liked to mix with his people, might thump the occasional citizen on the back when he was in the mood – he even spoke to them. Above all, he adjusted the dials of the homemade Communist system, after which the food didn’t run out on as many tables as quickly as it had before.

So, as the world continued to titter in horror over the puppy, he made sure that the citizens were no longer starving even as he realized that the country he’d inherited must either curl up and die or pick a fight with the whole rest of the world, which was striving to make sure that the former occurred.

He chose the fight-picking.

But there was a slight issue with North Korea’s inadequate finances. It would cost much more than they had squirrelled away to upgrade the aged Soviet tanks and ordnance. Better, then, to speed up the pace of the project Dad had helmed with a certain level of success.

Not many bombs. Just a few. But with a decent amount of oomph in them.

Nuclear weapons, in short.

By way of the development of the nuclear weapons programme and an eternal number of test-fired missiles, he informed the scornfully smiling world that North Korea was still in the game. Young Kim was rather satisfied when the world reacted with fear, sanctions and repeated condemnations. Incidentally, he was no longer ‘young Kim’ but Supreme Leader.

As a godsend, the United States replaced a Nobel Peace Prize-winning president with one who constantly fell into Kim Jong-un’s traps. Each time Donald Trump ran his mouth about how North Korea would be struck by ‘fire and fury’, he bolstered the Supreme Leader’s position.

During his first years in power, Kim Jong-un had achieved more than his father had done in his whole life. There was really only one thing that concerned him: the fact that the domestic plutonium factory had such trouble making it. The downside to plutonium is that it does not occur naturally in the earth. Anyone who wishes to play around with it, to build nuclear weapons for example, must first make sure he can create it.

And that’s no small task.

Even the production of five tiny grams is a tough job. But say you succeed in that. Then it must be stabilized, preferably to 99 per cent or greater, with the help of the element gallium, which in turn has the troublesome tendency to melt about as easily as a chocolate bar in the sun.

To stop the entire plutonium process slipping through your fingers, you must have a fancy centrifuge, and that is almost as complicated as the very process it is meant to aid.

All this for five grams of weapons-grade plutonium 239. For a nuclear charge worth mentioning, you need more like five kilos.

Things would probably have worked out if only the Russians had stopped giving the North Koreans the run-around. They had quietly promised to deliver a centrifuge, but now they were making excuses this way and that. It was not an option to wait out their dilly-dallying for eternity upon eternity. Kim Jong-un hated being anyone’s lapdog.

Incidentally, the Russians were masters of double dealing. They might vote for sanctions against North Korea on Monday, half promise a centrifuge on Tuesday – and offer up valuable uranium contacts before the week was out.

For the alternative to homemade plutonium was enriched uranium. It could be had on the black market in the darkest parts of Africa. But the proud Democratic People’s Republic had many enemies out there. Half a ton of material for nuclear weapons was not the sort of thing you could ship intercontinentally by DHL.