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.
And now the schizophrenic characters in Moscow had tipped them off about enriched uranium in Congo.
But could the supplier be trusted?
And would the delivery method work?
Both questions were currently under investigation.
The new president of the United States had been forced to fire his security advisor after it turned out the advisor was a security risk. Beyond this, his focus during the initial period of his presidency was to try to get the media to shape up. It was going so-so.
As a result it was basically a welcome interruption for President Trump when the Supreme Leader in Pyongyang allowed four mid-range Pukguksong-2 missiles to be fired five hundred kilometres straight out into the Sea of Japan.
On the initiative of the United States, Japan and South Korea, the UN Security Council was convened, and it soon unanimously condemned the North Korean test. The American ambassador to the UN commented that ‘It is time to hold North Korea accountable – not with our words, but with our actions.’ What those actions might be, she was happy to hand over to the president, who in turn tweeted a number of suggestions.
It so happened that little Sweden was a member of the aforementioned Security Council that year. Margot Wallström, Sweden’s minister for foreign affairs, was known for her outspokenness and enterprising nature. It was said, but not confirmed, that Benjamin Netanyahu had a picture of her on his office wall in Jerusalem and liked to throw darts at it each time he needed to work out his frustrations. This was because Sweden, on the urging of Margot Wallström, had upped and recognized the state of Palestine. A state without borders, without a functioning government and, as Netanyahu and others saw it, a state full of terrorists.
But Wallström persisted. And now, on the Security Council, she aimed high. Among her colleagues she promoted the idea that she should personally visit Pyongyang to establish a direct line of contact with the leader about the serious nature of things, as a representative of both Sweden and the UN Security Council. The visit must first be sanctioned by North Korea, and it must be completely unofficial. A high-level diplomatic game, but also a serious attempt to tone down the war rhetoric coming from both sides.
No Western country had as genuine a diplomatic relationship with North Korea as Sweden did. The Security Council gave Wallström the green light. All that remained was to convince the Supreme Leader to do the same.
* * *
If Torsten Lövenstierna had been an athlete, he would have been world-renowned and a multi-millionaire. But instead he was a diplomat, so no one had ever heard of him.
During his nearly thirty years in the Swedish foreign service, he had quietly performed his highly qualified services in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan. Among his merits were a posting to the UN in New York, being a special advisor during the Iraq inspection, taking on a leadership role in Mazar-e Sharif, and serving as the Swedish consul general in Istanbul.
What Torsten Lövenstierna didn’t know about advanced diplomacy wasn’t worth knowing. Now he was Sweden’s ambassador in Pyongyang, perhaps the most complicated embassy posting of all.
According to some, he was a genius. Whatever, it was this man who had received the delicate task of bringing the North Koreans onto the track of discreet arbitration.
World peace was on the line. Torsten Lövenstierna prepared himself meticulously, as always. Following his preparations he requested, and was granted, an audience with the Supreme Leader. The ambassador wasn’t nervous – he’d been around far too long for that – but he was incredibly focused.
With great precision, deploying the right word at exactly the right moment, he conveyed the UN’s argument for why quiet arbitration in Pyongyang would be in the best interest of the aforementioned world peace. He was so skilled at his job that he managed to finish his speech without being interrupted even once. What Torsten Lövenstierna accomplished in front of the Supreme Leader was nothing other than a feat of diplomacy.
When he had finished, he expressed thanks for being allowed to take up the leader’s precious time, then awaited a