Last week the North Korean government (officially, the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, a misuse of the word “democratic” if ever there was one), threatened a massive nuclear strike if the United States and South Korea carried out their annual “war games” in international waters. This set of war games is being conducted to demonstrate that both South Korea and the U.S. maintain considerable, well-coordinated military strength in the region, and that the action of North Korea, in sinking a South Korean ship, the Cheonan, was intolerable and that it would not be permitted to pass unnoticed.
This somewhat more muscular response follows another feckless resolution from the United Nations, which condemned the attack on the ship but not the attacker. Why the fear of offending this bankrupt nation that cannot feed its own people, all of whom live in a virtual prison camp? The answer is obvious; – it is estimated that North Korea has a nuclear arsenal of up to 10 nuclear bombs They also have a missile delivery system, and so the world must wait with bated breath to see what the stroke-ridden dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, known to his people as Dear Leader, will do in response to the war games.
We bring up North Korea to emphasize the outsize influence a rogue state can have if it possesses nuclear weapon capability. The immediate relevance relates to Iran’s nuclear program on which there appears to be a consensus that weapons grade plutonium is being developed, and that a bomb will be manufactured shortly thereafter. Whether the world is months or years away from Iran’s demonstration of its nuclear capability, we do not know. Recently, CIA Director, Leon E. Panetta, stated that Iran already has material for two atomic bombs. As we know, one nuclear bomb going off could spoil your whole day.
President Obama has spent a little more than a year reaching out to the Iranian regime to no avail. No serious negotiations commenced. Although the Iranians deny that their nuclear program is for other than peaceful uses, it will not permit international inspectors to verify that claim.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, in a report this spring on Iran’s nuclear program, suggested that Tehran has produced 2400 kilograms of low enriched uranium, which is apparently enough to build two atomic weapons after the material is further enriched. Iran has made clear its intention to further enrich its uranium, and, tellingly, has agreed to ship, for storage, only 1200 kilograms (or half) of its stockpile to Brazil and Turkey under the much heralded fig-leaf pact it entered into with those two nations last May. Accordingly, the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States recently imposed further economic sanctions on Iran in hopes that this set of sanctions will convince the Iranians to abandon their nuclear efforts. We think that is very unlikely.
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