Tablet:
Earlier this month, North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile capable (ICBM), capable of reaching Alaska. It is believed that Pyongyang now has enough nuclear material for up to 30 nuclear weapons, missiles that can easily range U.S. bases and allies in Asia, and, in a couple of years, it will possess an ICBM capable of holding at risk the continental United States. This would make North Korea only the third U.S. adversary (after Russia and China) with the ability to threaten nuclear war against the United States and its allies.
If we are not careful, Iran may be next.
The North Korean nuclear crisis began in the 1990s. At the end of the Cold War, Pyongyang signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), but international inspectors immediately found discrepancies in North Korea’s declarations. Washington suspected Pyongyang of harboring a secret program to reprocess plutonium for the production of nuclear weapons. (Along with uranium enrichment, plutonium reprocessing is one of two methods to produce nuclear fuel for either nuclear reactors, or for nuclear weapons.)
President Bill Clinton’s administration prepared a military strike on North Korea’s nuclear reactor, but the operation was called off due to hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough. Republicans in Congress derided the Clinton administration’s naivety for its engagement with a nuclear-seeking totalitarian regime, but a deal was eventually struck. Under the 1994 “Agreed Framework” North Korea agreed to freeze its plutonium production program in exchange for economic aid and other benefits. Some of the deal’s proponents argued that the details of the agreement did not really matter, however, because it was only a matter of time before the Kim regime in North Korea fell, solving the problem for us.
We now know that North Korea cheated on the agreement almost from day one, launching a secret uranium-enrichment program with the help of sensitive nuclear assistance from Pakistan…
