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Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Why Collapsing North Korea Must Still Be Our Goal

Even if we have an agreement with North Korea that verifies they've shut down a reactor, I have little confidence that we can possibly keep them from pushing forward by different avenues to the same goal.

Two US nuclear experts think that North Korea could mount 5-12 nuclear warheads on shorter ranged missiles:

The non-governmental group's report added: "the warhead may not be reliable, and it may have a relatively low yield."

Many proliferation experts doubt whether North Korea has the ability to miniaturize a nuclear warhead to fit on a missile.

The ISIS report said North Korea had probably obtained technology from overseas that would help it make a crude nuclear warhead.

Experts do not doubt that North Korea has hundreds of missiles, including its modified Scud-type missile called the Rodong, that are capable of hitting all of South Korea and large parts of Japan.


This is different from past assessments that figured detonating a nuclear device is a far cry from actually making a warhead. Althoughthe experts do question the reliability of anything the North Koreans might slap together.

But this sort of debate kind of misses the point. It's the regime, stupid. Always has been. A decent regime would be no threat with 100 nuclear weapons (even I don't worry about nuclear-armed France). A hideous regime is a threat with no nukes and I don't even want to think about what they can do with nukes.

Squeeze Pyongyang. Even committed to supplying oil, we must make sure we dole it out slowly so that the North Koreans can't accumulate a stockpile or sell it for short-term gain to bolster their regime. Keep these negotiations going and only give the Pillsbury Nuke Boy the hope that he can avoid collapse by dealing with us.

We can't trust them, you know. We do realize that, right?