N. Korea claims nuclear test success

It appears that Kim Jong Il was not bluffing and that he has carried out the nuclear test that he threatened to do.

This confirms that abject failure of the Bush regime to prevent North Korea acquiring a nuclear weapon. The regime that tore up Clinton's carefully negotiated deal with North Korea - a deal that allowed UN inspections and cameras in all of North Korea's nuclear facilities - today wake up to the reality of where their neo-con policy regarding North Korea has led us.

The U.S. Geological Survey said it recorded a seismic event with a preliminary magnitude of 4.2 in northeastern North Korea that coincided with the country's announced nuclear test.

Much will be written today regarding the reaction of North Korea's neighbours and even the shock and anger of traditional allies of North Korea, like China; but the focus should actually be on the abject and utter failure of a neo-con policy which amounted to a "do nothing" policy.

The truth is the Bush administration did not have a policy regarding North Korea and several times refused to enter into any negotiations with North Korea's regime.

The end result of this startling abdication of duty by Bush and his cronies is that, at a time when his regime is claiming to be seeking to rid the world of WMD that may fall into the hands of terrorists, they have sleepwalked and allowed Kim Jong Il to enable North Korea to become the ninth country to join the nuclear club.

We can expect the usual duplicity from a regime that never accepts any responsibility for anything that happens on their watch, but this disaster is purely of their own making.

The stupidity of Bush on this subject is best illustrated with his own words:

First of all, there's a big concern here in our country about North Korea and I'm absolutely convinced this issue will be solved in a peaceful way.

People say, well, are you willing to talk to North Korea? Of course we are. But what this nation won't do is be blackmailed.

Is there a single person in the world who doesn't think that it is easier to blackmail someone whilst holding a nuclear bomb over their head?

The truth is North Korea acquiring nukes is yet another dreadful consequence of the Bush administration's pitiful obsession with Iraq. Had they not been so determined to invade and remove Saddam they would have been equipped to treat this threat much more seriously:

On Oct. 4, 2002, officials from the U.S. State Department flew to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and confronted Kim Jong-il's foreign ministry with evidence that Kim had acquired centrifuges for processing highly enriched uranium, which could be used for building nuclear weapons. To the Americans' surprise, the North Koreans conceded. It was an unsettling revelation, coming just as the Bush administration was gearing up for a confrontation with Iraq. This new threat wasn't imminent; processing uranium is a tedious task; Kim Jong-il was almost certainly years away from grinding enough of the stuff to make an atomic bomb.

But the North Koreans had another route to nuclear weapons--a stash of radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade earlier from its nuclear power plant in Yongbyon. These rods could be processed into plutonium--and, from that, into A-bombs--not in years but in months. Thanks to an agreement brokered by the Clinton administration, the rods were locked in a storage facility under the monitoring of international weapons-inspectors. Common sense dictated that--whatever it did about the centrifuges--the Bush administration should do everything possible to keep the fuel rods locked up.

Unfortunately, common sense was in short supply. After a few shrill diplomatic exchanges over the uranium, Pyongyang upped the ante. The North Koreans expelled the international inspectors, broke the locks on the fuel rods, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to a nearby reprocessing facility, to be converted into bomb-grade plutonium. The White House stood by and did nothing. Why did George W. Bush--his foreign policy avowedly devoted to stopping "rogue regimes" from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--allow one of the world's most dangerous regimes to acquire the makings of the deadliest WMDs? Given the current mayhem and bloodshed in Iraq, it's hard to imagine a decision more ill-conceived than invading that country unilaterally without a plan for the "post-war" era. But the Bush administration's inept diplomacy toward North Korea might well have graver consequences. President Bush made the case for war in Iraq on the premise that Saddam Hussein might soon have nuclear weapons--which turned out not to be true.

Saddam, as we all now know, did not have the weapons that the neo-cons were claiming that he had and there had never been the concrete proof that the Bush regime claimed they possessed proving that Saddam's weapons existed.

What was known that Kim Jong Il had the capability to produce a nuclear weapon.

As seismic monitoring centre's all over the world are today confirming, Bush and his incompetent cronies had their eyes on the wrong ball.

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tag: Bush, neo-cons, North, Korea, nuclear, tests, bomb, containment, policy, failure, Kim Jong Il, , Iraq, Iraq war