New York Post:
Recent Chinese estimates of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons capabilities should have shattered our complacency about Pyongyang’s proliferation threat.
Moreover, given the ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran’s longstanding, close working relationship with Pyongyang should also have rung alarm bells around the world.
Instead, the revelation that the North might already possess 20 nuclear warheads, and could double that in 2016, quickly sank from view.
While both the media and US intelligence agencies face enormous obstacles in covering North Korea, China’s estimates of Pyongyang’s nuclear infrastructure, especially its uranium-enrichment capacity, nonetheless compel our attention.
Beijing’s judgment may be imperfect, but its enormous presence and influence in the North make it far likelier to be accurate than US, Japanese or South Korean estimates.
North Korea’s sizeable nuclear arsenal imperils East Asia — particularly, Tokyo and Seoul — but also the United States. Its ballistic-missile program is rapidly nearing the capability of reaching our West Coast.
And the North’s deep poverty gives it every incentive to sell virtually any weapons or technology to anyone with hard currency, including terrorists or other rogue states.
Besides being one of the planet’s poorest, most isolated, most repressed countries, the North has been under comprehensive American sanctions since the Korean War and extensive UN sanctions since 2006, when it resumed ballistic-missile launches and first tested a nuclear device.
None of this prevented Pyongyang from progressing to the threatening levels China now assesses.
This alone should warn us that the less-comprehensive, less well-enforced sanctions against Iran could never compel it to renounce its 30-year quest for deliverable nuclear weapons. If North Korea, perennially on the brink of starvation, can become a nuclear power, Iran can easily match its fellow rogue state…
