On-The-Stop Non...Did You Just Hear A Boom?

Another day, another mea culpa.

My wife spent yesterday and today at an ADHD (attention deficit & hyperactivity disorder) seminar, just a delightful way of spending one's weekend judging by the rancorous mood she brought home both days. The reason we dropped $85 on this seminar is our son, whose behavioral problems and chronic unseriousness about his education now have him on the precipice of academic expulsion from the private junior high school in which he is, for the moment at least, enrolled as a seventh grader. After a mass meeting with ourselves, all his teachers, and two assistant principals Friday, he has precisely to the end of this month to pull off a miracle and raise his grades to a C average or he's history. And given all the particulars, I'm frankly pessimistic about his chances.

As you might imagine would be the result, I haven't slept much or well lately, and have been carrying around a perpetual low-grade headache. In such a state of mind the idea of blogging on "Masturgate" was not unlike sticking a finger down my throat. But I'm still committed to wrapping up my comments on that bizarre, now-shark-jumped escapade.

I've no choice. Events are marching on, as they always do, and a little over four hours ago a really big one went down:

South Korean government officials said North Korea performed its first-ever nuclear weapons test Monday, the South's Yonhap news agency reported.

South Korean officials could not immediately confirm the report.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun convened an urgent meeting of security advisers over the issue, Yonhap reported.

The North said last week it would conduct a nuclear test as part of its deterrent against a possible U.S. invasion.

US signals intelligence has confirmed the test, which generated a tremor registering 4.2 on the Richter scale.

The NoKos threatened it last Tuesday. Today they made good on their threat.

Here's another threat they issued a few days later:

The first message is that Kim Jong-il is the greatest of the peerless national heroes Korea has ever produced. Kim is unique in that he is the first to equip Korea with sufficient military capability to take the war all the way to the continental US. Under his leadership the DPRK has become a nuclear-weapons state with intercontinental means of delivery. Kim is certainly in the process of achieving the long-elusive goal of neutralizing the American intervention in Korean affairs and bringing together North and South Korea under the umbrella of a confederated state.

Unlike all the previous wars Korea fought, a next war will be better called the American War or the DPRK-US War because the main theater will be the continental US, with major cities transformed into towering infernos. The DPRK is now the fourth-most powerful nuclear weapons state just after the US, Russia, and China.

The DPRK has all types of nuclear bombs and warheads, atomic, hydrogen and neutron, and the means of delivery, short-range, medium-range and long-range, putting the whole of the continental US within effective range. The Korean People's Army also is capable of knocking hostile satellites out of action.

All the past Korean heroes let the Land of Morning Calm be reduced to smoking ruins as the wars were fought on its soil, even though they repelled the invaders. One of the two major aspirations of the Korean people has been the buildup of military capability enough to turn enemy land into the war theater. Kim has splendidly achieved this aspiration. [emphases added]

Kim's nearest continental US target is an hour's drive from where I write these words.

Hugh Hewitt, as is his want, distills this into a concise, powerful two sentence closing argument:

The Clinton-Kim 1994 Agreement, midwifed by Jimmy Carter, bears its fruit. How long until the gangster regime sells its wares to jihadists?

Or, rather, how long have they been doing so already?

With the Taepodong-II in their inventory, NoKo surreptiousness may be a thing of the past.

Kinda throws my son's school difficulties into the deep shade. Or as Plato from Beetle Bailey once said:

Things are never so bad that they can't get worse.

UPDATE: Looks like the size of Kim's "big bang" wasn't very big (relatively speaking):

The size of the tremor could indicate an explosive equivalent to 550 tons of TNT, said Park Chang-soo, spokesman at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources — which would be far smaller than the nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in World War II.

Approximately one-thirtieth their size, to be more precise.

The size of the test blast, though, isn't very significant. The fact that this proves the NoKos have nukes does, and has already set in motion a new nuclear arms race in northeast Asia at the very least.

This factor is thought by some to be likely to motivate Russia and Red China to cease protecting North Korea from UN sanctions, since while a nutty, sabre-rattling client state is useful for them in distracting us and keeping the West off-balance, that nutty, sabre-rattling client state actually having nukes means more potential trouble for them than it can possibly be worth.

Personally I don't buy it. If the ChiComms truly wanted to bring Kim jong-Il to heel, I doubt that it would take even twenty-four hours. Simply cutting off all his energy supplies would do the trick nicely. Kim's regime continues to exist because Beijing allows it. If they told him to de-nuke, he'd run off that pot belly in his frantic haste to comply.

As to the Russians, they're serving as Kim's press agents.

So imagine my unimpressedness with the Bush Administration's response to the NoKo test:

The US has demanded that the UN Security Council take action against North Korea, assumably in the form of a tough sanctions regime.

The UN, again. An organization that hasn't been worth a damn to the cause of international security since, well, it (by which I mean the United States) stopped Kim's pop from overrunning South Korea half a century ago. And that only happened because the Russians were fortuitously absent when the Security Council voted on going forward with the Korean "police action".

But by the same token, it's regrettably the case that the Bushies don't really have any good options short of accepting and undertaking the war that, just as in the Middle East, appears inevitable before it can get even worse by stalling it. And that's because the Clintonoids didn't leave them any.

It's almost a case of picking our poison. That's the kind of choices you get when you entrust the running of the country and its foreign policy to people whose heads function only in the Land of Make-Believe.