Well, here’s a story that should knock Foley off the front page.
[tag]North Korea[/tag] said Sunday night that it had set off its first [tag]nuclear test[/tag], becoming the eighth country in history, and arguably the most unstable and most dangerous, to proclaim that it has joined the club of nuclear weapons states.
The test came just two days after the country was warned by the United Nations Security Council that the action could lead to severe consequences.
American officials cautioned that they had not yet received any confirmation that the test had occurred. The United States Geological Survey said it had detected a tremor of 4.2 magnitude on the [tag]Korea[/tag]n Peninsula.
China called the test a “flagrant and brazen” violation of international opinion and said it “firmly opposes” [tag]North Korea[/tag]’s conduct.
Senior Bush administration officials said that they had little reason to doubt the announcement, and warned that the test would usher in a new era of confrontation with the isolated and unpredictable country run by President [tag]Kim Jong-il[/tag].
It’s a rather dramatic development, which coincides with the election of a nationalistic leader in Japan and a vote on South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon becoming the next Secretary General of the United Nations. The test seems certain to touch off a new WMD race in east Asia, which is hardly an encouraging development.
What’s more, putting the genie back in the bottle may be exceedingly difficult — as the WaPo noted, no country has ever given up its nuclear program after a successful nuclear test.
Politically, it’s yet another embarrassing setback for the [tag]Bush[/tag] administration, whose approach to the North Korea crisis can hardly be called a “policy.”
Since Bush took office in 2001, what kind of progress have we seen on the peninsula? North Korea has grown progressively more dangerous; Kim Jung Il has removed weapons inspectors from the country; the number of nuclear weapons in the country is believed to have grown considerably, and international demands about missile and nuclear tests have gone ignored.
The Institute for Science and International Security released a report in July that estimated that North Korea has enough separated plutonium to develop an arsenal of four to 13 nuclear weapons, compared with estimates of just one or two weapons in 2000. By 2008, the Institute believes North Korea could have enough plutonium for eight to 17 nuclear weapons.
What, exactly, has Bush’s policy been? Walk loudly and leave your stick in Iraq.
There was some bizarre grumbling in July that North Korea’s progress on the nuclear front is, like all of the world’s ailments, Bill Clinton’s fault. We’ll no doubt hear more of the same today. Don’t believe it for a second.
The 1994 Agreed Framework wasn’t perfect, but it did represent progress. Clinton offered North Korea light-water reactors for electrical power, and Kim Jung Il agreed to allow full monitoring and inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. When Bush took office, Colin Powell endorsed a continuation of the Clinton administration policy, but was quickly overruled (and rebuked) by the White House. Bush ended negotiations, scraped the Agreed Framework, called Kim Jung Il names, and gave up on having any kind of coherent policy whatsoever.
After the Bush White House ratcheted up the rhetoric, North Korea, as Fred Kaplan explained, “pulled out of the Nonproliferation Treaty, kicked out the IAEA’s inspectors, unlocked the fuel rods, reprocessed them into bomb-grade plutonium — and that’s where things have stood for the past three years.” The crisis, exacerbated by the Bush administration’s incompetence, has grown considerably worse.
Consider the bottom line today when the right starts blaming Clinton for this mess.
[P]rogress of North Korea’s nuclear program during the last three administrations:
1. George H. W. Bush: one to two bombs’ worth of plutonium
2. Bill Clinton: zero plutonium
3. George W. Bush: 4-6 nuclear weapons’ worth of plutonium
And a missile test. And a nuclear test. It’s quite a success story, if you’re anxious to make the world more dangerous.
As Josh Marshall put it:
The Bush-Cheney policy on North Korea was always what Fareed Zakaria once aptly called “a policy of cheap rhetoric and cheap shots.” It failed. And after it failed President Bush couldn’t come to grips with that failure and change course. He bounced irresolutely between the Powell and Cheney lines and basically ignored the whole problem hoping either that the problem would go away, that China would solve it for us and most of all that no one would notice.
Do you notice now?
We better.