For U.S., a Strategic Jolt After North Korea’s Test | NYT

[BootinUp]

By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 10, 2006

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — North Korea may be a starving, friendless, authoritarian nation of 23 million people, but its apparently successful explosion of a small nuclear device in the mountains above the town of Kilju on Monday represents a defiant bid for survival and respect. For Washington and its allies, it illuminates a failure of nearly two decades of atomic diplomacy.

North Korea is more than just another nation joining the nuclear club. It has never developed a weapons system it did not ultimately sell on the world market, and it has periodically threatened to sell its nuclear technology. So the end of ambiguity about its nuclear capacity foreshadows a very different era, in which the concern may not be where a nation’s warheads are aimed, but in whose hands its weapons and skill end up.

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What it tells you is that we started at the wrong end of the ‘axis of evil,’ ” former Senator Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who has spent his post-Congressional career trying to halt a new age of proliferation, said in an interview. “We started with the least dangerous of the countries, Iraq, and we knew it at the time. And now we have to deal with that.”

snip

“Think about the consequences of having declared something ‘intolerable’ and, last week, ‘unacceptable,’ and then having North Korea defy the world’s sole superpower and the Chinese and the Japanese,” said Graham Allison, the Harvard professor who has studied nuclear showdowns since the Cuban missile crisis. “What does that communicate to Iran, and then the rest of the world? Is it possible to communicate to Kim credibly that if he sells a bomb to Osama bin Laden, that’s it?”


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/world/asia/10assess.html?hp&ex=1160539200&en=4476571b6d74d04a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[ClintonTyree]

1. It's all Bill Clinton's fault..........

or at least that's what I've been hearing from the GOP talking heads on every 24 hr. "News" Channel lately. Yep, The Blivet has been president for nearly 6 years, has done absolutely NOTHING about the NK "nookular" problem, but it's all Bill Clinton's fault for sending Madeline Albright to talk to them all those years ago. It "legitimized" them, or so the GOPers say. Bush has rattled his saber and called them names, now THAT is what I call "foreign policy". ;)

Yep, the "Clenis" once again reaches forward in time and screws everything up for georgie boy. :eyes: It couldn't possibly be bush's total inaction that paved the way for NK's "nookular" test. Nope, no siree! It's that damned "Clenis" again.