North Korea attempted last year to sell a metal used in nuclear weapons development to an unidentified buyer on the international market, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. The news comes amid growing signs that the Hermit Kingdom is collaborating with Iran on illicit nuclear and ballistic missile research.
According to United Nations investigators, North Korea tried to sell a form of lithium metal that can be used in miniaturizing nuclear warheads.
The attempted sale has “sparked new concern in the Trump administration, Congress and the U.N. about the proliferation threat posed by Pyongyang’s growing nuclear- and ballistic-missile programs,” the Journal reported.
Enriched lithium or lithium-6 can be used to increase the explosive power of a nuclear blast. North Korea’s production of the metal is “seen by nuclear experts as evidence of the country’s accelerated efforts to miniaturize a nuclear warhead, potentially for use on ballistic missiles,” the Journal noted. Lithium-6 would also allow countries to “build bombs with smaller amounts of plutonium or uranium.”
Lithium also has civilian uses, including batteries, and North Korea is believed to have large deposits of the metal within its boundaries.
American, Israeli, and Arab officials told the Journal that in the past, North Korea has sold missile technology Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen.
More evidence of cooperation between North Korea and Iran in the realms of nuclear and ballistic missile development has emerged in recent months.
Satellite pictures published late last year showed that North Korea had built a ballistic missile silo similar to one that exists in Tabriz, Iran. The similarity between the two sites suggests that the nations were collaborating on ballistic missile development and nuclear weapons research, according to Strategic Sentinel, the firm that published the pictures.
In mid-December, investigative journalist Claudia Rosett reported that Sen. Ted Cruz (R – Texas) asked then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper what the United States intelligence community knows about Iranian nuclear cooperation with North Korea.
Rosett pointed out that it was unusual for Iran to be devoting resources to developing ballistic missiles, which are “cost-efficient only as vehicles for delivering nuclear warheads,” if it had sworn off the development of nuclear weapons, per the 2015 nuclear deal. She suggested that “North Korea’s nuclear program might be secretly doubling as a nuclear backshop for Iran.”
Israeli Lt. Col. (ret.) Dr. Refael Ofek and Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Dany Shoham wrote in February that North Korea is likely “ready and able to furnish a route by which Iran can clandestinely circumvent” the nuclear deal.”
Ofek and Shoham noted that one of the technical cooperation agreements signed between the two nations fell under the purview of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, and that an Iranian delegation reportedly attended a North Korean nuclear test in 2013.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency reported last year that Iran engaged in clandestine efforts in 2016 to buy illicit nuclear technology “at what is, even by international standards, a quantitatively high level.”
“Against this backdrop it is safe to expect that Iran will continue it sensitive procurement activities in Germany using clandestine methods to achieve its objectives,” the agency added.
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