Lethal Stockpile

Kim Jong Un’s enrichment drive revives old Cold War dilemmas in a new Asian theatre.

Few regimes are as adept at turning scarcity into menace as North Korea. A country where electricity is rationed and hunger is widespread has nonetheless managed to spin enough uranium through its centrifuges to amass a stockpile that could shake Asia’s strategic order. This week, in an unusually blunt estimate, South Korea alleged that Pyongyang now held some 2,000 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium, enough in theory to fashion nearly 50 nuclear bombs. For a state that has built its survival on the threat of annihilation, that is a geopolitical milestone.

The revelation is a reminder of how North Korea, one of the poorest and most isolated countries on earth, has mastered the darkest of modern technologies. Enrichment is no trivial undertaking; uranium must be spun through thousands of centrifuges before it reaches weapons-grade. That Pyongyang can now sustain production at four known sites suggests not only scientific expertise but also the procurement networks and covert supply chains that decades of sanctions were meant to crush.

The story of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions is a tale of broken promises. In the early 1990s, amid the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pyongyang agreed in principle to halt its weapons programme under the 1994 Agreed Framework with America. In return it was to receive aid and two light-water reactors. But mutual suspicion and political shifts in Washington meant that deal collapsed. North Korea pressed ahead, secretly enriching uranium while continuing to extract plutonium from spent fuel at its Yongbyon reactor.

Its first nuclear test in 2006 confirmed what intelligence services had long suspected. A cascade of sanctions followed, as did cycles of diplomatic courtship. The Six-Party Talks of the mid-2000s, involving America, China, Russia, Japan and both Koreas, yielded little more than temporary freezes. Each breakdown allowed Pyongyang to push its programme further, testing ever more powerful devices in 2009, 2013, 2016 and 2017. When Kim Jong Un met Donald Trump in Singapore in 2018, the prospect of disarmament briefly flickered. Yet subsequent summits collapsed on North Korea’s insistence on keeping its arsenal as the ultimate guarantee of regime survival.

Five to six kilograms of plutonium is enough for one bomb; 42 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium suffices for another. Pyongyang’s two tonnes of HEU therefore represent not just an incremental step but a leap. In theory, the regime could scale its arsenal to rival that of established mid-tier nuclear powers such as Britain or France. For America and its allies, it is one thing to face a handful of North Korean devices, another to confront dozens dispersed across hardened bunkers and mobile launchers.

This arithmetic also unnerves China. Though Beijing remains Pyongyang’s main economic lifeline, it has no wish to see instability on its northeastern border—or to encourage Japan and South Korea to pursue their own nuclear options. Tokyo already possesses the technology and fissile material to produce bombs within months; Seoul, too, debates the logic of an independent deterrent when faith in America’s ‘nuclear umbrella’ wavers. North Korea’s enrichment binge could therefore cascade into wider proliferation across Asia.

South Korea’s new president, Lee Jae Myung, promises a softer touch than his hawkish predecessor, Yoon Suk Yeol. His unification minister, however, warned that sanctions alone cannot work, calling instead for a direct summit between Pyongyang and Washington. That may be wishful. Kim Jong Un has already signalled that talks are possible only if his nuclear arsenal is accepted as permanent. For America, that remains anathema, not least because of the precedent it would set for other would-be nuclear states.

Once a state has mastered enrichment and weaponisation, rollback is virtually unheard of. The challenge then shifts from prevention to containment.

Two tonnes of uranium may be an abstraction. But it represents the hardening of a reality the world has long preferred to ignore: North Korea is no longer a threshold state but a de facto nuclear power, growing in strength. To treat it otherwise is to mistake hope for strategy.