Useful Fools

Pity the North Koreans. They just keep making horrible threats which are routinely ignored. Today they threatened to withdraw from the 1953 armistice, or put another way, to restart the Korean War.

Yawn.

Oh, and they warned that they will take “merciless retaliatory measures” in response to any economic blockade.

Yawn.

They don’t seem to realize that they have already taken the only action short of war that will bring a response: restarting their nuclear program. By comparison, their gum flapping is irrelevant.

Surely by now they know that military action on their part will result in the total destruction of their vicious regime, but the psychosis of the government may be too deep to properly appreciate this fact.

Their only hope is to achieve a credible nuclear threat before they are stopped. Then they can put teeth into their blackmail threats, scaring at least the fickle South into paying tribute, but probably causing Japan to immediately go nuclear and invest in antimissile systems (guess who has a huge stockpile of plutonium, and a reprocessing plant… hint… they speak Japanese).

For the NorKs to achieve a credible threat, they need deliverable weapons, meaning ones which can be placed on missile warheads. So far, there is no reason to believe they have them, although they have started testing the explosive assemblies needed to make them. Furthermore, to deter the United States they have to be able to threaten US cities with them, which also requires longer range missiles than they have demonstrated.

The world needs to stop this most rogue of all rogue regimes before it achieves any more progress. Right now, we hold the deterrent: if the NorKs misbehave as a result of actions we take to denuclearize them, they will be destroyed.

Bombing their reactor would stop their creation of plutonium. Bombing the plutonium reprocessing sites would make much more difficult their current harvesting of already existing plutonium… except that they may have hidden one or more of those facilities underground.

Over the Clinton decade the Norks built a number of very large underground facilities - and we apparently don’t know whether there are reprocessing sites in them, although its a good bet. After all, its unlikely they are hiding huge stocks of food there! This just means that we have to destroy all entrances to those facilities while we are at it… perhaps a few hours after hitting the reactors, giving the leaders time to get underground first!

In accordance with the old Chinese proverb, we are living in “interesting times.”