China is North Korea’s only outside supplier of energy and financial aid and a major source of food for a country in a state of constant starvation. China had strongly urged N. Korea not to conduct the test because it would destabilize the entire global region. Now Japan and South Korea may begin to develop their own nukes in self defense and they are both allies of the US, which could even supply the nukes.

North Korea’s regime is highly unstable because of the countrys extreme poverty. If China were to cut off all the supplies that are trucked into N. Korea, there would very likely be a string of military coups. If the border security should break down because of the governments collapse, refugees would cross over into China by the millions.

For China, this is a worst-case scenario and the reason why China implored N. Korea NOT to go forward with a nuke test. Now China has begun building border fences and strengthening the existing ones, and will no doubt post a large number of armed guards along the border with N. Korea to repel a flood of refugees. At the same time, China has begun inspecting the cargo going to N. Korea in compliance with the UN sanctions, even though they dissented on doing so. This is because China has control of whether Kim Jong Ils N. Korean dictatorship lives or dies, and failure to enforce the sanctions would encourage Japan and South Korea to go nuclear.

The current N. Korean government now hangs in the balance. Too little pressure and Kim will continue his defiant and dangerously destabilizing behavior. Too much and his government will collapse entirely. The latter would be a good thing for our side as the huge N. Korean army would dissolve and all those cannons aimed at S. Korean cities would go unmanned. That would be an opportunity to move in and make needed changes. Time will tell.

About the test itself: It was definitely under a kiloton and it should have yielded far more. This means it was like the last missile test, premature and basically a failure. The missile that was supposed to have been capable of reaching the USA fizzled out after 40 seconds of flight. These are acts of desperation by a spoiled brat who demands attention all the time. All the attention was going to Iran, so Kim pushed his scientists and engineers to proceed with tests before they were really ready. This will undo him.

N. Korea has few resources other than its starving people, and wants income from the sales of missiles and nuclear weapons. A nuke that’s deliverable by rocket missile is clearly years away yet. A truly functional ICBM is probably also years away. So the nukes would have to be delivered to targets by ship or aircraft, and a 500 ton yield nuke that weighs 4 tons isn’t going to bring much cash compared to one that weighs a lot less and has a yield of at least 10 kilotons.

The only way Kim can sell such nukes is to prove they work first, and for that he must conduct another test. Another test will surely force China to either cut off aid entirely to N. Korea, thereby causing collapse of Kims dictatorship, or will cause Japan and S. Korea to accept nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, an event China wants even less than a flood of N. Korean refugees. Therefor, the situation now is that either the manufacture of nuclear weapons in N. Korea stops or the regime collapses and the manufacture then stops anyway. Either way, national income drops to zero and Kims regime may not survive.

North Korea has been doing virtually all its nuclear-related business with Pakistan, home of the Taliban, and Iran, home of Hezbollah and most of the Iraqi “insurgents”. This action in curbing North Korea was vital, diplomatically. China has finally been brought to the table as an ally in stopping nuclear proliferation instead of abetting it. Now China has to be kept at the table, with leg irons if necessary, metaphorically speaking, to put pressure on Iran and this may be possible by threatening Japan-S. Korea nuclear arming. Until now, China has been voting against any sanctions on Iran because of the oil and other deals between them. By conducting that test, Kim has put China in exactly the position it never wanted to be in, and if China is forced to back away from Iran because of it, Russia will then find itself without an ally in its own Iranian stance. If Iran loses China and Russia as backers, it will be a lot less confident and aggressive.

This doesn’t mean there is any chance of Iran abandoning its nuclear program. In fact, there’s a very real possibility that when Kims regime falls, a lot of his physicists will go to Iran. What it does mean is that with China and Russia backed off of Iran, the way is much more clear for us to bomb and destroy the Iranian nuclear installations and remove a huge threat to our allies and ourselves.

It’s not that we lack the tools of aggressive diplomacy, it’s that we seem to be shy about using them. Now the US is presented with a golden opportunity to force some tyrants to back down. All we have to do is stick to our guns.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 6:01 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.