#Pure Lithium 6 is a substance that turns an ordinary atom bomb into a hydrogen bomb, and it can accelerate the impact of the bomb by nearly a thousand times. So when intelligence agencies across the world were confronted with an online ad that was offering 22 pounds of the destructive substance on a monthly basis, this from a port within China, they pounced.
Selling in an area called Dandong, China, there was even a phone number listed in ad, according to a report from the New York Times on Monday. Furthermore, the identity of the seller was traced to the identity of the third secretary in the Beijing #North Korean Embassy.
Lithium for sale
Nuclear and military intelligence experts claim that this leftover lithium sale indeed proves that #North Korea must have created so much of the valuable substance that it may have already become an #advanced nuclear power. This is what President Trump was briefed on last week by intelligence officials who are familiar with the machinations of bombs.
And so the world is waiting for President Trump's meeting with #President Xi Jinping of China in Florida this week, where officials claim that his number one agenda will be asking, or pressuring, China to sign onto the most extreme and confrontational set of sanctions ever imposed on the North for its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs.
On Sunday the president told The Financial Times “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all that I am telling you.” And nobody really knows exactly what Trump – who is prone to a changeable and at times opaque style – means when he says that he will solve the problem.
If China does nothing to halt #the nuclear issue than Trump won't find much leverage or luck in the handbook of the previous four US presidents, who tried an unsuccessful mix of negotiations, threat and sanctions to press the North into abandoning its program.
Over time, North Korea continues to progress, step by step, in the face of overwhelming odds brought on by the United States and its allies.
Whilst the president insists that he will solve the North Korea problem, some of his closest aides are not sure whether the objective of “complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament” is feasible anymore, even though it was a cornerstone of the Bush and the Obama offices.
New strategy for the North needed
Last week, Michael Morell, a former director at the CIA, along with James Winnefeld Jr, mused on the website The Cipher Brief about the changing objective of the #North Korea policy. They wrote that the United States needs to change the "fundamental objective of our policy, because North Korea will never willingly give up its program." This belief that this was even possible is the biggest flaw in the United State's strategy with the country. They argue that the US and China should both free themselves of the idea of denuclearizing North Korea and instead engage in methods of deterrence, one of the most old fashioned diplomacy policies in history.
