"No Time To Party"

It's nice - and in this week in particular, more than a little edifying - to see my small-fry wisdom on the latest "big deal" with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program be echoed in higher places:

The threat has been reduced just barely, because the aging Yongbyon reactor may already have been near the point at which it was no longer useful in the production of nuclear weapons. If it is still useful, there is nothing to stop Kim from firing it back up at any time. What is unquestionably still useful is the uranium-enrichment equipment he bought from A. Q. Khan, the regrettably entrepreneurial Pakistani nuclear scientist. And then there are the nuclear weapons Kim has already built. No one knows for sure how many there are, or how powerful their yield, but North Korea is thought to have enriched enough plutonium for ten or more bombs since 2002, when it gave IAEA inspectors the boot.

There remains no reason to think that Kim will voluntarily part with these weapons, because they are the best guarantor of security he will ever have. Even more than the artillery he has massed within firing range of Seoul, the atomic bombs protect him against attack. They permit him to threaten terrible retaliation for any action that may destabilize his regime. And, perhaps most important, they allow him to extort the energy and food aid from his neighbors that — along with his consortium of black-market businesses — keeps his government afloat.

This agreement isn't quite the complete fleecing that Bill Clinton's "Agreed Framework" was. We didn't give Kim jong-iL everything he wanted up front, and he is having to at least give the appearance of discussing the possibility of maybe, at some unspecified time in the future, shutting down Yongbyon. And, again, it's true that we don't have the military options available to us on the Korean peninsula that we do vis-a-vie Iran (at least for the time being, anyway).


But the fact is that this deal is a strategic victory for Kim because it takes the international pressure off of him for a while. Now he can resume collecting Western economic aid, laundering American currency, and when the coast is clear, resuming his production of nuclear weapons, and laying the groundwork for the next confrontation. And don't think that he doesn't know who's likely to be in the White House when it's time to trigger it.


The Bushies did the best they could with a really bad hand. In a few years, the Clintonoids will do their worst with a hand so bad it'd make Ray Charles flinch. A very comforting thought, given that where I live is within the range of the NoKo's longest-range ICBM - and the Iranians are among their best customers.