And the second half the message they are sending is " by the way, we've also got long range ballistic missles that can strike Los Angeles".

The message they are sending is "You might not like us, but are you willing to trade 500,000 of your own dead to get what you want"?

A clear message from the president stating the fact that any attack on the US in the form of any weapon of mass distruction will result in immediate and total distruction of the offending country.

( dont the Cuban's get along real well with the DPRK? - what will our response be if the Cubans decide to back the DPRK?)

Axis of evil? exactly goddamned right.

The problem lies in the fact that identifying the offending country will become increasingly difficult with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the possible use of cut-outs in their deployment. I am not being hyperbolic when I state that the U.S. may soon be in greater danger of suffering a nuclear attack, although not a totally annihilative attack, than it ever was during the cold war.

I make no claims for what the NK government is thinking, but it strikes me as highly unlikely that we would be considering an actual invasion of North Korea. We have two problems with doing so:

1) We're overextended militarily and Iraq is a more urgent problem.

2) We have to consider the problem of a possible Chinese intervention if we attack North Korea. After all, they intervened in the last Korean war. The fear of another such intervention was one of the reasons that our strategy in Vietnam was so poor. Our "experts" wanted to do _something_, but didn't dare go clean house in North Vietnam itself.

Patrick, I concur wholeheartedly that the US has no plans to invade North Korea, nor would it be in our interests to do so.

Eventually, the DPRK will collapse under its own weight. The transition won't be as smooth as the inter-German reconciliation, but I expect something along those lines.

And, like the 4+2 negotiations that "allowed" reunification in Germany, I excpect Korea will have to give up some candy to China to keep them happy.

I dont think we are going to invade the DPRK. We do have 30,000 troops stationed just across the wire in south korea, but I dont think they are going anywhere, for that matter I dont think the DPRK are going anywhere either.

But let' s look at it this way, in 1990, after the russians woke up one day and realized there was just no profit in being a communist, all of the little hangers-on countries found themselves in a real fix. They used to be guaranteed a free hand to do what they wanted because their patron the USSR could keep the US away. After the USSR fell, they had to quickly find a way to make sure they didnt go next.

The way to do that is to have at least one WMD and the ability to deploy it (perferrably nuclear). in the great poker game of international politics, the small country gets to say to the Big-Bad-US " we cant kill all of you, but how many of your people are you willing to sacrifice just so you can deal with little old us"?

( Will Allen - In regards to the problem of identifing the offending party, I dont think it matters that much, just pick one from the list of obvious suspects, the rest will get the message. we didnt need to have a real forensics exercise before we started a war with spain, we just did it, not because we were in the right, but because it was the right thing to do. )

Frank, the problem with that strategy is that it provides incentive for an actor to nuke an American city, if the actor can conceal that it ever possessed such capability, and if they think the U.S. will annihilate the actor's primary target in response. The nuked U.S. becomes annihilator by proxy, and the instigator sits undamaged on the sidelines. Impossible? Reflect on the history of relations between Iran and Iraq, or the realtionships between any number of history's tyrants, and then make an argument that such actor's would never embark on such course of action. Nuclear deterrence up until now has depended on a very small number of actors who cannot easily conceal their behavior. As the number of actors increases to unknwon numbers, and the source of an attack is more easily concealed, the model becomes entirely subject to catastrophic failure. Remember, in the nuclear world, anything less than 100% success represents catastrophe.

We have more and bigger nukes than North Korea.

The North Koreans don't have enough to kill America.

I expect a diplomatic note from America to China saying America will support a nuclear armed Japan with an American missile Defense...unless China annexes a new famine prone Korean province.

That may be the most mangeable solution in many ways, but the South Koreans may not be thrilled with it. My fear is not the North Korea will blatantly nuke an American city, but that they could be the source of still more proliferation, with terribly destabilizing consequences. North Korea has shown itself to be capable of what we would consider to be entirely irrational actions.

screw arming japan.. tell the chinese that they will be eliminated unless they get their client state NK and its client states (the rest of the bastards) under control. if the US gets nuked, the chinese get it, the NKs get it, and whoever we think did it... the price of arms deals then gets way too fing high and they'll figure out how to deal with the problem, as they know where the bodies are buried...

The timing is not curious, the Bush administration confronted them with evidence supporting our belief that N. Korea had been violating the Clinton accord. They only admitted it because they were caught. Otherwise, this wouldn't have been released until they were prepared to announce the successful testing of their first nuclear weapon, i.e., we have it already, too late to prevent it, surrender dorothy.

I don't think NoKo's have missiles that can hit L.A. Honolulu or Alaska maybe, but not L.A.

I dunno. I personally like the theory that NK did it just to show up Carter (negotiator of the '94 agreement) just after he got the Peace Prize.

There are definitely odd things going on in NK these days. The people are starving. The PROC is none too pleased with the continuing stream of NK defectors seeking asylum in foreign embassies in Beijing. NK just admitted they kidnapped Japanese citizens. They are starting up a capitalist enterprise zone. And, now this.

It appears to me they are flailing around all over the place. My gut tells me there is no real strategy here, and we are seeing the beginning of the end.

A couple of serious thoughts:

1. North Korea's actions, while almost certainly under duress during the recent visit by Jim Kelly, are part of an odd "liberalizing" effort. Let's remember that they also admitted that they had kidnapped Japanese citizens---this despite a long-standing record of simply denying and refusing to deal w/ the charges. This suggests that something is going on in Pyongyang, that is making them 'fess up when confronted.

2. What is w/ this "Chinese client state" business? North Korea, at this point, is no more a Chinese client state than China is a Russian one. Kim Il-Sung (Kim Jong-il's father) truly pissed off Deng Xiaoping, when he was shown around the newly capitalizing parts of China and pretty much accused Deng of being a traitor to Communism. The younger Kim hasn't made any more friends, w/ the same attitude. And the writing out of Chinese "volunteers" from North Korean histories made no military friends in the PLA, either. I'd venture that North Korea's demise would be as much a relief to the Chinese as to us.

3. The scary possibility that a colleague of mine raised is that North Korea is looking like late-Gorbachev Soviet Union. They, too, suddenly 'fessed to everything, were ultra-conciliatory, and still couldn't reform fast enough to get ahead of the curve. Why is this scary? Because, at the end of the day, I'm not nearly as certain that Kim Jong-il has either a grip on the situation or understands how bad-off they are---so what might they do as things collapse around them??

The real problem is not NK in and of itself. NK is not going to nuke Los Angeles, or Seoul, or Tokyo.

They have been surviving through technology and weapons sales for years. They've sold rocket technology to Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, India, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. They hire out nuclear talent to anyone who will pay the price. They've built radars and missiles for export. They are *THE* weapons maker for rogue regimes.

The real problem will be when some SOB we've never heard of buys a nuke from Jong-Mentally-Ill. Have no doubt, he will sell what he has. That is how he has financed the regime, and the money gets poured back into engineering new weapons.

On the other hand, he will probably be willing to sell what he has to us, for the right price. Their admission is simply the first round of bargaining on price.

He's a commie, but he has a keen eye for value.

further to earlier post

Years of cautious diplomacy aimed at drawing reclusive North Korea into the international sphere were thrown a stunning curve amid disclosures on Wednesday that Washington confronted Pyongyang earlier this month with evidence about a secret program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. The U.S. administration said Pyongyang's continuing effort clearly violated a number of international agreements, and suspended talks.
...
The United States, South Korea and Japan had established the Agreed Framework to get the North to eliminate its nuclear weapons in a "verifiable manner."

But in Pyongyang Oct. 3-5, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly confronted the North Koreans with information indicating they had a program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons in violation of the 1994 framework and its International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards agreement.

"North Korean officials acknowledged that they have such a program," Boucher said.

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/reuters20021017_35.html

North Korea never had any intention of fulfilling their commitments. Clinton wanted foreign policy success, Carter wanted to burnish luster of his rep in search for Nobel peace prize, and both hoped that shoe wouldn't fall before they each fulfilled their own agenda.

Undoubtedly the Norwegians would have given Carter the prize despite this latest catastrophic failure of his foreign policy adventurism. However, the Nobel Peace Prize aint what it used to be. As the Wall Street Journal continues to remind us, Arafat was also awarded the Nobel

The bizarre thing about the admission of the kidnapping of Japanese citizens is that many more South Koreans have "disappeared" over the past few decades. Now SK citizens will be screaming for information about a topic that has always been shoved off the table.

Personally, I'm stunned at the lack of world reaction to the admission that NK kidnapped citizens of another country, and is now "allowing" them a two-week vacation back in Japan. Anyone who trusts Pyongyang (or similar regimes) is a patsy, fool, or sympathizer, or all three.

Kieran,

I'm afraid I have to disagree about Kim Jong-il's eye for values. Other than the high likelihood that, like any good con-man, he'll sell the Brooklyn Bridge to multiple suckers.

The fact of the matter is that, if Kim had such an eye, he would have exploited the opportunities available to improve North Korea's economy, even without too much political loosening.

Opportunities which included:

UN Development Program up at the border w/ Russia and China (early 1990s);
Hyundai investments, including cruises (late 1990s);
Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy" (late 1990s), all of which aimed at pumping money INTO North Korea, in exchange for fig-leaf political loosening (including allowing family visits).

Either Kim Jong-il figures he can't afford ANY loosening (which means he's in trouble), or he could care less for the long-term and simply wanted the millions in hard-currency that he got in each case.

So, I'd agree he'll sell WMD to anyone who can pony up the money, but he won't sell ONLY to us, even at inflated prices.

Here are the major reasons the North Koreans told us that they still have a nuclear weapons program (and please note; they said they had a program, not that they had a nuclear weapon):
- With President Bush in charge instead of Mr. Clinton, they know that they are not going to be handed all the goodies (reactors, fuel oil, food) that Clinton gave them for agreeing to pretend to stop their program. Since he made it clear that he wouldn’t require verification, because he knew the North Koreans wouldn’t accept it, he basically told them up front that he wanted window dressing to cover him politically; that is exactly what the North Koreans agreed to give him. The illusion of compliance for the impression of success…
- South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung is soon to be gone. South Korean law only allows a single 5-year term for president. (In North Korea, Kim Il-Song, after dying, was elected “President for Eternity“; his son, Kim Jong-il’s official title is “Chairman of the National Defense Committee”.) The candidates lining up in the next election basically all agree that the “Sunshine Policy” is a failure and that future interaction with the North will actually have to be interaction i.e. both parties will have to participate in some way.
This means that the free gravy train is coming to a halt. They’ve been getting everything they asked for for eight years without conceding a single meaningful position. Now they are ready to deal with the new reality. The North Korean government’s sole priority is regime survival. To them, everything (anything) else is just gravy. Since the simple days of ‘demand and the “useful idiots” will grant’ have come to an end, and they feel seriously threatened, the logical step is to announce that they’ve been working on nuclear weapons the whole time. The key reason to do this is for the deterrent factor. They intend to head off an attack like the one building up for Iraq now, before it gets any momentum at all. It costs them nothing, and might preclude a forced regime change, and is therefore a perfectly reasonable step for them to take. That is it in a (rather longish) nutshell.

We should tell them to give up their nuclear weapons program or we'll cut off their food shipments. We're sending them 155,000 metric tons of food this year as "humanitarian aid." If they're not going to cooperate, let them starve. Most of that is probably going to the DPRK military anyway, since the peasants are eating grass.

The official policy of the DPRK is "Military First"; that is a quote, and they aren't kidding. Cutting off food supplies would not impact the military directly, it would just mean that they would take more food from people who don't work in priority defense related jobs and divert it back to the army to make up the difference. They demonstrated that this is their preferred option by actually doing it until international food aid started arriving.

Another interesting point on the DPRK admission is the fact that it was an admission. Even with the knowledge that the DPRK wanted a nuclear weapons program and were aquiring the materials for such a program, many still held to the belief that the agreements in and of themselves would prevent the DPRK from pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The fact that N. Korea conducted a secret nuclear weapons program under the noses of the international community does not bode well for those who argue that there is no way Saddam could conduct a "secret" nuclear weapons program right under our noses within the last 11 years. I guess the point is that if a country has the ambition and the means to aquire the technology for a nuclear weapons program, then it is going to be difficult to determine for certain they are in fact pursuing such a program. Unless they simply admit to it. (I don't see Saddam doing that any time soon.)

Another interesting point on the DPRK admission is the fact that it was an admission. Even with the knowledge that the DPRK wanted a nuclear weapons program and were aquiring the materials for such a program, many still held to the belief that the agreements in and of themselves would prevent the DPRK from pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The fact that N. Korea conducted a secret nuclear weapons program under the noses of the international community does not bode well for those who argue that there is no way Saddam could conduct a "secret" nuclear weapons program right under our noses within the last 11 years. I guess the point is that if a country has the ambition and the means to aquire the technology for a nuclear weapons program, then it is going to be difficult to determine for certain if they are in fact pursuing such a program. Unless they simply admit to it. (I don't see Saddam doing that any time soon.)