Authors: Patrick Robinson
He had been told that North Korea, which is about the size of the state of Mississippi, had a population of 24 million, half of whom lived in Pyongyang. But even after driving halfway across the country, miles upon miles through a deserted, rugged landscape, he had no idea where the others lived. Only occasionally were there small fishing villages clustered to his right, on the shores of the Sea of Japan.
Ravi had been allowed no insights or prior knowledge before entering the country. There were no photographs or promotional handouts demonstrating the excellence of Korean manufacturing. He was just given a map of the country showing the main towns and roads, and a driver to take him to the factory inside Kwanmo-bong.
The only other facts the General knew about North Korea were military—that this ridiculous, backward Third World outcast owned the third largest army in the world, with 1.2 million men under arms (as opposed to 650,000 in South Korea). One quarter of Korea’s GDP was spent annually on their Armed Forces and yet their Navy was very modest, their air force large but mostly obsolete.
The place gave Ravi the creeps. But he had no time to worry about that. In a couple of hours he would need to be on high alert, and he stared straight ahead, thinking, while the big army truck clattered along the coastal highway.
They came roaring through the towns of Hamhung and Pukchong, and followed the northeastern Korean railroad to Kilju and Chilbosan. Another 20 miles and his driver would veer left off the main road onto what looked like a track—only this one would be a 15-mile track into the foothills of the mountains, and then cleaving a long upward path through the granite range. Wooden guardhouses would stand sentinel on either side, every half-mile. Almost nowhere along this sinister highway was it possible to be
out of sight of the armed patrols. It was, without question, the most secret of all roads, befitting this most secretive of all nations.
For General Ravi it meant the end of a long journey, starting essentially in Moscow, although he had not gone there personally. Here, the formal inquiry from the Iranian Navy requesting the purchase of a number of RADUGA SS-N-21 cruise missiles, two of them equipped with 200-kiloton nuclear warheads, had been met with a stony silence, and just one question—
Do you intend to have them fitted into your
Barracuda
submarine?
The Iranians valued their relationship with the Russian Navy and were not about to tell a flagrant lie. Their affirmative reply had led the Russian Navy to inform them they were unable to supply the RADUGAs under any circumstances whatsoever.
Next stop Beijing. The Iranians asked if they could produce a missile precisely copying the RADUGA. It was a question that elicited an immense amount of hemming and hawing from the Chinese, who finally admitted that after having been so closely involved with the Hamas mission of
Barracuda I
in the U.S.A., the last thing they needed now was for
Barracuda II,
with a boatload of nuclear-capable Chinese-made missiles, to be discovered by the Americans, in brazen conflict with the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In general terms, the Chinese were not averse to assisting their friends and clients in the Middle East. They had an extremely serious interest in the oil fields around the Gulf, and were prepared to run certain risks while helping the occasional rogue regime. But that did not include arming the second
Barracuda
for these wild men from the Middle East to cause havoc. Too dangerous. No good for business. Americans can get cross with Muslims. Not China. The Chinese did not really have a missile that would be readily adaptable to convert to the RADUGA dimensions anyway. They probably had the guidance and tracking software, cunningly acquired from the Americans in the 1990s, but they were less confident in their own hardware, especially for short-range cruises.
Which left General Ravi with few options, the most unlikely of which was the little state of Bosnia, where Jugoimport, a state-owned conglomerate in Belgrade, was reputed to have been working with Iraq to develop a cruise missile. Jugoimport was also reported to be working with the military operation Orao Arms, located in Bijeljina, the second largest city in the Bosnian Serb Republic, up in the northeast.
Orao had claimed only to have helped repair Iraqi warplanes, but the cruise missile evidence was damning, and it was obvious that Orao (a) knew how to make a guided missile, and (b) how to propel it for fairly long distances. Every arms dealer in the Middle East knew they had considerable expertise in the field of warheads. And for that reason, General Ravi had undertaken the journey there from Syria.
But there had been too many gaps. The personnel at Orao were hardworking and ambitious. They had scientists working night and day trying to perfect nuclear warheads. But they were not there yet. They were superb in propulsion, and very competent with the guidance software. But General Ravi wanted precision, guaranteed workmanship that would work the first time, every time.
The General demanded massive penalty clauses, should there be a malfunction. The Bosnians thought long and hard about the huge income from the Hamas operation, but the risk was too great. Hamas would clearly have had problems persuading a court of international law to uphold their delivery contracts. But the Orao executive had an uncanny feeling that if they failed to make reparations for malfunction, this cold-eyed Middle Eastern military chief would not hesitate to have them taken off the map.
They were correct about that, but everyone parted friends. The last words one of the scientists uttered to General Ravi before he flew home to Damascus were:
You must go to North Korea. They can sell you what you want. They have the technology and much more experience than we do.
And now he was looking for the left turn, the track up through
the foothills of the Hamgyong-Sanmaek range, the one that led to the nuclear complex inside Kwanmo-bong.
And General Ravi looked grim as he considered his awesome checklist—dimensions, fuel requirements, software for the detonation. And, above all, cost. He was about to spend close to $500 million on a magazine of missiles—eighteen cruises with a standard warhead. Two with nuclear warheads, 200 kilotons each of explosives.
Barracuda I
had been purchased with a full complement of RADUGA cruises already aboard, so he knew almost to the inch what they should look like. The big Russian shells were gray in color with
SS-N-21 Sampson
(
RK-55 Granat
) painted in small Russian letters on the underside.
They were 26 feet long, 18 inches wide, with a launch weight of almost 1.75 tons. They carried a single nuclear warhead packing a 200-kiloton wallop. RADUGA flies at Mach 0.7, 680 mph, 200 feet above the surface, with a range of 1,620 nautical miles. Launched from a standard 21-inch torpedo tube, the RADUGA’s wings, mounted towards the stern, unfold immediately as it blasts clear of the water. The missile is essentially land-attack, and operates on a terrain-following system, guided by a radar altimeter. It’s accurate to about 100 yards. Plenty for General Ravi’s purposes.
In a world full of big business, nothing was much bigger than his. Nothing was more ruthless. And nothing was more dangerous. He just hoped the North Korean technicians could now justify their low bows, confident smiles, and promises he had seen when he was here last.
As they approached the first gate along the track, he was not looking forward to any part of this visit. Beyond pondering the ability of the North Korean technologists to replicate faithfully the RADUGA missile he was looking for, right now he was a great deal more concerned with their safety procedures in what was obviously a toxic environment inside Kwanmo-bong.
General Ravi was not a nuclear expert. But he knew the subject,
and, above all, the qualities of uranium, its three highly radioactive isotopes with their nuclei of unstable elements, U-238, U-235, and U-234, with the prevalent U-238 forming more than 99 percent of the whole, the weapons-precious U-235 only 0.711 of a percent.
U-235 is the isotope that matters, because it not only has the ability to “fission”—split into two lighter fragments when bombarded with neutrons—it could also sustain a chain reaction, with each fission producing enough neutrons to trigger another, thus eliminating the need for any other source of neutrons. This raging buildup of energy in the bombardment of the neutrons, smashing into and splitting the atoms millions of times over, is, essentially, a nuclear bomb. The U-235 is rare and hard to produce, but it produces an impact that makes regular TNT look childish.
In comparison, though, regular U-238 is no slouch in the weapons industry. It could not produce the deadly chain reaction of U-235, but when converted to plutonium-239 it can. This substance, virtually nonexistent in nature, was the heart of the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
The General had spent countless hours studying nuclear energy at his home in Damascus and he understood its production to a tee. The mining of uranium—the “milling” process—in which the uranium oxide is extracted from the raw ore to form the yellowcake, that yellow or brown powder almost entirely made up of the oxide. Then there’s the huge volume of waste, the “mill tailings,” some forms of which are radioactive for 75,000 years.
Ravi had no idea whether any of this stuff had leached into the ground water in the mountain springs around Kwanmo-bong, but he was resolved not to risk it. Any drinkables might be full of radium-226, as well as heavy metals like manganese and molybdenum. He was pretty certain this miscreant communist state would not have the safety measures in place that are enforced by law in the West.
Inside this great mountain there was a vast uranium-enrichment plant that converted the element into a chemical form, uranium hexafluoride, a diabolically toxic and radioactive danger to anyone
who gets near it. The “enrichment plants” had suffered a number of accidents, all of them involving hexafluoride, and Ravi was not looking forward to this close proximity with living death.
Shaking himself out of such grim thoughts, he turned around and, grinning encouragingly at young Ahmed Sabah, his own wife’s beloved brother, he concentrated instead on the missiles. Could the North Koreans deliver on their promise to use their own technology to convert their one-stage medium-range Nodong-1 missile into a submarine-launched RADUGA? They were approximately the same size and dimension, and had successfully been sold to the Iranians—the
Shahab-3
—but it was open to question whether the North Koreans could engineer the more refined rocket motor, the rocket’s automatic wings, and the correct components to affix to a nuclear warhead.
They had sworn they could and had been sufficiently honest to admit their weakness with regard to the software for the automatic guidance system. But Ravi had successfully bargained with the Chinese, who agreed to fit these anonymous but expensive and critical finishing touches to the missile’s preprogrammed navigational computers. Most of the technology was American in origin.
So far as Ravi had been informed, the missiles were complete, ready for shipping to the North Korean seaport of Nampo. All he needed to do was conclude the payments, and accept delivery. The Koreans may have been fugitives from the international community, but no one had ever questioned their business methods or their reliability.
The sun was sinking fast behind the mountains now, and it was beginning to rain. Up ahead, Ravi and Ahmed could see lights and what looked like a long, high chain-link fence. They were bumping over a rough and hilly surface, and they could see the big gates folded right across the track, floodlit, the rain glistening off the metal, armed guards standing directly in front of the high steel structure. It would have required a full-blown U.S. M-60 tank to smash its way through there and you would not have put your life savings on its success.
Ravi’s driver drew the juggernaut to a halt and wound down the window on the driver’s side. The guard, who was obviously expecting the big military truck, held out his hand for papers, stuffed them inside his raincoat, and walked to the front and rear of the vehicle, checking the registration numbers. Then he walked over to the guardhouse and inspected the papers under a light, where it was dry, before walking back out and handing over the documents. The big gates were already being swung back by two other guards. The original man waved them through and the driver continued on up the track in driving rain and pitch dark.
They passed several more guardhouses on either side of the stony, pitted causeway to Kwanmo-bong and stopped again by another set of high metal gates after about seven miles. The inspection procedures were much the same as before, and again they were waved through, grinding their way up the mountain.
The last five miles were easily the most arduous. The track became steeper, and the rain, if anything, worsened, slashing down out of the northwest, head-on into the windshield of the lurching army truck. You didn’t hear many compliments about the cars made in the Qingming Automobile Company in the old Chinese capital of Chongqing. But on the way up Kwanmo-bong, Ravi found a new respect for the Chinese car factory.
“Ahmed,” he said in English, “I guess those guys know how to make a mean automobile in Chongqing. This thing has taken some kind of a pounding, and somehow we’re still going.”
“I didn’t even know the Chinese made automobiles,” replied Ahmed. “I thought they bought shiploads of them, secondhand, piled on all decks from the U.S.A.
“No, that’s the Russians. The Chinese have a huge manufacturing plant in Chongqing.”
“Where the hell’s that, Ravi?” asked Ahmed.
“It’s very deep in the interior. Sichuan. They somehow built this damn great city halfway up a mountain overlooking the valley where the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers meet. It’s nowhere near
anywhere, 700 miles from Shanghai, 800 from Beijing. Over 15 million people live there, and they make a lot of cars and trucks.”
“How do you know all that?”