Slashdot Mirror
Mushroom Cloud Reported Over North Korea
cbrocious writes "Yahoo! News is reporting a mushroom cloud over North Korea that occured on Thursday in Yanggang province near the border with China. 'The explosion in Kim Hyong Jik county blasted a crater big enough to be noticed by a satellite, the source said.'"
It's not humbling. It's just an indication at how grotesquely incompetent the mainstream media has become at reporting anything more significant than who got voted off the island.
Clinton and the democrats safely contained these crazy dictators.
So when North Korea unilaterally backed out of the bilateral freeze agreement Clinton got, that was safely contained? And when Clinton got a second agreement, during which apparently Pakistan was selling secrets to North Korea, that was safely contained?
What we had under Clinton was an agreement framework that a. did not have any lasting effects since it only froze and did not permanently dismantle, b. had no significant means for enforcement. These are not really mere opinions, since we know that North Korea is now picking up where it left off before, and that we were unable to enforce the decade-long freeze.
That is not safe containment, by any definition I can think of. And it is why Bush and Powell have insisted on changing "bilateral" to "multilateral" (which makes the agreement far more enforcable), and "freeze" to "CVID" (complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement).
Iraq was believed (by everyone, even France & Germany) to be headed in the same direction. The disagreement was in how to head it off. One approach favoured continuation of the containment policy which worked so well with NK; the other approach called for destroying Hussein while he was still easily destroyable.
Now, it currently appears that the consensus of the world's intelligence agencies was incorrect, and that Hussein's WMD programmes were illusory, or at most far less advanced than any serious analysts believed. Still, IMHO the Iraq action was defensible based on what we knew at the time.
Regarding NK, there's just not much we can do. If we make the first move, they can annihilate a few million South Koreans. If we let them make the first move, they'll probably annihilate a few million South Koreans. It's a nasty situation.
Yes: Nuke 'em till they glow and shoot 'em in the dark.
Not saying it's a good idea, but it's definitely a choice that our current idiot-in-chief would consider. Yes, it would piss off the Chinese. Do I think he's bright enough to not piss off a billion Commies armed with nukes and a superiority complex? Do I think he's bright enough to pour piss out of a boot?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I read NK's stance as pretty much defensive. If you were suddenly part of 'The Axis of Evil', and you just watched one of your axis members get invaded, you'ld probably want some detterent also. This implies that they can probably be negotiated with.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Technically, the Korean War is not over.
This is what happens when you let the UN negotiate ceasefires with psychopathic dictators. Any bets on how many months until NK does test a real atomic bomb?