North Korea's underground atomic weapon test is a wild card that could potentially derail the Neo-Con battle plan to carry out air strikes on Iran. Will the myopic hubris of the Bushists make them blind to the incompatability of selling a war on a nation years away from nukes while another openly proliferates, or could it just make the likelihood of a false flag terror attack more likely?



Russia is now saying that the test was far greater than first reported, in the region of 5,000 tons to 15,000 tons of TNT, an upper limit which would put it on a par with the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

Reports concerning developments in North Korea's nuclear program are routinely absent the "memory-holed" fact that it was Donald Rumsfeld, former non-executive director of ABB, that signed off on a $200 million dollar contract to sell nuclear reactors to the Stalinist state in November 2000. Has Rumsfeld's wanton act of chaos-mongering resulted in a form of blowback that could eviserate the entire roadmap of his administration?

How does the test affect the global and domestic propaganda campaign to justify air strikes on Iran?

Mike Rivero over at What Really Happened reckons North Korea has "put the screws," to any US-led invasion.

"It will be hard for Bush to sell an invasion of Iran because it might someday make nuclear weapons when North Korea definitely has them now. Bush has to attack North Korea before Iran, and who will support an attack on a nation that actually HAS nuclear weapons of mass destruction."



This makes a lone Israeli attack the more likely scenario, but there is no doubt it will be backed by covert US support and a huge domestic distraction.

Fox News seemingly welcomed the nuke test as beneficial for the Bush administration in that it was the only story capable of knocking Foleygate off the air.

"Never mind the tremendous implications of this -- it's all about GOP politics, all the time, on Fox "News," write News Hounds.

The world has been made infinitely more dangerous, due not to the significantly increased danger posed by Kim Jong-il, but because the Bush regime has to go to even greater lengths to sell an attack on a nation ten to fifteen years away from producing the bomb.

The Neo-Fascists are more desperate than ever to manufacture a false flag event that can propel Iran back above North Korea in the fear stakes. Watch for the Rovian rhetoric to be shifted from Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology to their alleged support of terrorists in Lebanon and Iraq.

Kim-Jong-il may be a mentally unstable lunatic but he's not short of geopolitical nous. He knows that the Bush war machine only targets defenseless tinpot dictators and leaves real members of the nuclear club alone.

But his actions have greased the skids for a desperate lunge on the part of the Straussians - the most likely outcome being a huge attack on Jerusalem or Tel Aviv blamed on Iranian backed Hezbollah, providing the Israelis with a UN mandate to retaliate that would stifle the voices of enough critics to ractchet up the armageddon meter one more notch.

World leaders reacted with grim dismay to news that North Korea had successfully conducted its first nuclear test, an act of wilful defiance which threatens to redraw the strategic map of the entire Asian region and precipitate a global diplomatic crisis of uncalculated proportions.

The blast, at an underground facility in North Hamgyong province, was believed to have occurred at 11.36am North Korean time yesterday. Although seismic experts in other countries were trying to verify the claim, there seemed no reason to believe North Korea was bluffing.

Russian experts said they believed the claim was accurate and that the explosion may have had the power of about 15 kilotons of TNT, roughly the same as the Hiroshima bomb in 1945. "We have no doubt that it was a nuclear explosion," said Russia's Defence Minister, Sergei Ivanov. Counterparts in South Korea and the US speculated it may have been on a smaller scale.

North Korea forged ahead with the test in the face of demands that it desist, issued by the UN Security Council last Friday. An emergency meeting of the Security Council was convened yesterday after news that a test had taken place.

The only warning given by the North Koreans was to their counterparts in China about half-an-hour before the device was detonated. Chinese officials sounded the alarm in a telephone call to the US embassy in Beijing.

The US, backed by Britain, France and Japan, went to the UN demanding the imposition of a series of punitive measures.

It has taken North Korea almost four decades to piece together the technology to bring its nuclear ambitions to a head. With one detonation yesterday morning, it inserted itself into the club of so-called "undeclared" nuclear powers, previously made up of Israel (which still has never admitted having such a capacity), Pakistan and India.

The crisis comes at a time when Japan has a new, more nationalist-minded Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe. Japan was already debating whether its previously sacred tenet, held since the Second World War, that it should remain free of nuclear weapons should be reviewed. Mr Abe said the test marked the start of a "dangerous nuclear age" in northern Asia. Pressure will also be applied to South Korea to end its so-called "sunshine" policy of trying to thaw relations with its neighbour.

Yesterday, the Security Council formally approved the selection of Ban Ki Moon, the current South Korean Foreign Minister, as the next UN secretary general, taking office on 1 January. He vowed to use the office to engage North Korea in closer discussion with the UN.

Aside from the ripple effects that North Korea's new nuclear status may have on other countries in the region, there is deep concern over the threat of nuclear proliferation with Pyongyang possibly looking to sell its technology to clients in other regions of the world.

The blast demonstrates the failure of years of diplomatic efforts by the US and other nations to deflect North Korea from its nuclear path. Even China, North Korea's only ally, had recently made clear its disapproval of a nuclear test. North Korea had signed an agreement with the Clinton administration in 1994 to freeze its nuclear activities, but the pact unravelled and, three years ago, the country ejected international nuclear inspectors from its complex at Yongbyon.

The North Korean News Agency said the test "marks a historic event as it greatly encouraged and pleased the [Korean People's Army] and people that have wished to have powerful self-reliant defence capability".

In London, the test was condemned by Tony Blair as a "completely irresponsible act" as the UK joined members of the UN Security Council in preparing sanctions which are likely to include freezing the bank accounts of the regime's leaders. The Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, said: "The UK will be pushing for a robust response under Chapter 7 of the [UN] Charter. Put simply, this means we shall be pushing for sanctions ."

President Vladimir Putin said the test "doesn't just concern North Korea; enormous damage has been done to the process of non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the world".

In July, the UN passed a resolution banning trade with North Korea in any goods and technologies related to weapons of mass destruction after the regime launched several ballistic missiles without provocation.

The resolution did not have Chapter 7 backing - which gives any resolution maximum legal backing - and it was rejected by officials in Pyongyang.

In New York, China's ambassador, Wang Guangya, said his government was ready to "join Security Council members to discuss a firm, constructive but prudent reaction" to the test. Russia's Vitaly Churkin said keeping "cool heads" remained important, suggesting Russia was wary about Chapter 7 authorisation. Diplomats acknowledged that the positions of Russia and China were key to the prospects of adopting a text with any real bite. "We don't know what they mean at this stage, but we will see as discussion of the resolution starts," a source close to the Security Council said.

Unimposing, pudgy, two-dimensional, yet Kim Jong Il rules with an iron fist
(How do you know?)
By Carol Clark

Wielding absolute power in one of the most volatile regions on the planet, the personality of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, is hidden in a fog of propaganda as secretive as the nuclear arms programme.

He has allowed his voice to be broadcast only once. That was eight years ago during a Pyongyang military parade, when he said: "Glory to the Korean People's Army."

Scholars of the Pyongyang regime are unsure what lies behind the figure only occasionally glimpsed in public. He looks unimposing in photographs, but the short, pudgy and bespectacled man has managed to pull off the first communist dynastic succession in history. The dictator of the "Hermit Kingdom" has made only three known trips abroad and he rarely receives outsiders. The South Korean intelligence agency has portrayed Mr Kim as an unstable madman, a cognac- swilling playboy serviced by a team of women known as the "Pleasure Squad". But in recent years the rhetoric has changed considerably. A senior South Korean official was recently quoted as saying that Mr Kim possesses a genius IQ, and intelligence sources are now calling him a "computer wizard".

North Korea gives Mr Kim's official birthplace as Mount Paektu. The peak is the site where Korean legend says the nation came into existence 5,000 years ago. But Mr Kim was actually born on 16 February 1942 in the Soviet Union, where his father, Kim Il Sung, had fled from the Japanese. When the family returned after the Japanese surrender in 1945, Josef Stalin anointed Kim Il Sung as the leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. After graduating from Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung University in 1964, Kim the younger took over cultural affairs. In 1980, Kim Il Sung formally designated his son as his successor. He took on the title "Dear Leader" and the government began spinning a personality cult around him patterned after that of his father, the "Great Leader".

GEORGE BUSH, US PRESIDENT: 'The transfer of nuclear weapons or materiel by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be a grave threat to the US'

BAN KI MOON, SOUTH KOREAN MINISTER: 'I stand here with a heavy heart'

SHINZO ABE, JAPANESE PM: 'The development of nuclear weapons by North Korea will transform the security environment in North Asia and we will be entering a new nuclear age'

MARGARET BECKETT, BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY: 'We shall be pushing for sanctions'

FOREIGN MINISTRY OF CHINA: 'China expresses its resolute opposition'

VLADIMIR PUTIN, RUSSIAN PRESIDENT: 'Enormous damage has been done to nonproliferation'

Neo-Cons have seized upon doubts about the scale of North Korea's nuclear test to craft a talking point that the blast was a dud in an attempt to conceal the hypocrisy of hyping a war with a non-nuclear Iran in the face of North Korea's open proliferation, and the fact that Kim Jong-il bought his weapons from arms networks that were protected by the Bush administration.

Bill Gertz and the Washington Times, usually the first to spit out volleys of rampant fearmongering, especially concerning Iran's alleged nuclear agenda, are leading a chorus of government media mouthpieces in downplaying Sunday's underground atomic test.

"U.S. intelligence agencies say, based on preliminary indications, that North Korea did not produce its first nuclear blast yesterday," writes Gertz.

"The underground explosion, which Pyongyang dubbed a historic nuclear test, is thought to have been the equivalent of several hundred tons of TNT, far short of the several thousand tons of TNT, or kilotons, that are signs of a nuclear blast, the official said."

The U.S. seems to be alone in its assessment that the blast was non-nuclear - with Russia even claiming the explosion was comparable to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

The Drudge Report, recently scorned for carrying erroneous stories that sought to defend the actions of Republican pervert and sexual predator Mark Foley, this morning carried the headline, "WAS IT A DUD?" underneath a jokey image of Kim Jong-il's character from the comedy animation hit Team America.



The spin is implicit - Kim Jong-il is an inconsequential buffoon and his grandstand announcement that North Korea had joined the nuclear club was nothing but hot air.

Why are these bootlicking Neo-Con hacks, breaking from their usual feverish exaggeration of anything that makes the world more dangerous, changing the script and attempting to poo-poo North Korea's actions?

Yesterday we reported that the wild card of the test could potentially derail planned air strikes on Iran because, as Mike Rivero pointed out, "It will be hard for Bush to sell an invasion of Iran because it might someday make nuclear weapons when North Korea definitely has them now."

The Neo-Con spin, that North Korea has not advanced to the point it claims and that the threat is diminished compared to more pressing targets of the Bush war machine, is intended to shield the hypocrisy of ignoring a nuclear-capable dictatorship that has threatened to destroy the world and fired test missiles that have hit Alaska, while obsessing about Iran, completely surrounded by U.S. client states and as much as fifteen years away from the bomb.

It is also an effort to offset questions about how Kim Jong-il acquired his ar5enal in the first place.



Reports concerning developments in North Korea's nuclear program are routinely absent the "memory-holed" fact that it was Donald Rumsfeld, former non-executive director of ABB, that signed off on a $200 million dollar contract to sell nuclear reactors to the Stalinist state in November 2000.

In addition, it has now been confirmed that the A.Q. Khan network was directly connected to the feasibility of Sunday's test, having "through his network, transferred to North Korea "nearly two dozen" P-1 centrifuges, and the more sophisticated P-11 centrifuges," according to the London Independent.

It was at the behest of the Bush administration that investigations into Khan Research Laboratories, the Pakistani agency in charge of the bomb project, were thwarted.

"According to both sources and documents obtained by the BBC, the Bush Administration spike of the investigation of Dr. Khan's Lab followed from a wider policy of protecting key Saudi Arabians including the Bin Laden family," writes BBC reporter Greg Palast.

North Korea's bold entry into the nuclear club could not have been achieved without the help of the Bush administration and Donald Rumsfeld. Allied to the desperate need to legitimize air strikes against Iran, Sunday's events have created a fissure in the Neo-Con agenda that may demand an urgent change to the script.

Atlanta - In 1994 the North Koreans expelled inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and were threatening to process spent nuclear fuel into plutonium, giving them the ability to produce nuclear weapons.

With the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula, there was a consensus that the forces of South Korea and the United States could overwhelmingly defeat North Korea. But it was also known that North Korea could quickly launch more than 20,000 shells and missiles into nearby Seoul. The American commander in South Korea, Gen. Gary Luck, estimated that total casualties would far exceed those of the Korean War.

Responding to an invitation from President Kim Il-sung of North Korea, and with the approval of President Bill Clinton, I went to Pyongyang and negotiated an agreement under which North Korea would cease its nuclear program at Yongbyon and permit inspectors from the atomic agency to return to the site to assure that the spent fuel was not reprocessed. It was also agreed that direct talks would be held between the two Koreas.

The spent fuel (estimated to be adequate for a half-dozen bombs) continued to be monitored, and extensive bilateral discussions were held. The United States assured the North Koreans that there would be no military threat to them, that it would supply fuel oil to replace the lost nuclear power and that it would help build two modern atomic power plants, with their fuel rods and operation to be monitored by international inspectors. The summit talks resulted in South Korean President Kim Dae-jung earning the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize for his successful efforts to ease tensions on the peninsula.

But beginning in 2002, the United States branded North Korea as part of an axis of evil, threatened military action, ended the shipments of fuel oil and the construction of nuclear power plants and refused to consider further bilateral talks. In their discussions with me at this time, North Korean spokesmen seemed convinced that the American positions posed a serious danger to their country and to its political regime.

Responding in its ill-advised but predictable way, Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, expelled atomic energy agency inspectors, resumed processing fuel rods and began developing nuclear explosive devices.

Six-nation talks finally concluded in an agreement last September that called for North Korea to abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and for the United States and North Korea to respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize relations. Each side subsequently claimed that the other had violated the agreement. The United States imposed severe financial sanctions and Pyongyang adopted the deeply troubling nuclear option.

The current military situation is similar but worse than it was a decade ago: we can still destroy North Korea's army, but if we do it is likely to result in many more than a million South Korean and American casualties.

If and when it is confirmed that the recent explosion in North Korea was nuclear, the international community will once again be faced with difficult choices.

One option, the most likely one, is to try to force Pyongyang's leaders to abandon their nuclear program with military threats and a further tightening of the embargoes, increasing the suffering of its already starving people. Two important facts must be faced: Kim Jong-il and his military leaders have proven themselves almost impervious to outside pressure, and both China and South Korea have shown that they are reluctant to destabilize the regime. This approach is also more likely to stimulate further nuclear weapons activity.

The other option is to make an effort to put into effect the September denuclearization agreement, which the North Koreans still maintain is feasible. The simple framework for a step-by-step agreement exists, with the United States giving a firm and direct statement of no hostile intent, and moving toward normal relations if North Korea forgoes any further nuclear weapons program and remains at peace with its neighbors. Each element would have to be confirmed by mutual actions combined with unimpeded international inspections.

Although a small nuclear test is a far cry from even a crude deliverable bomb, this second option has become even more difficult now, but it is unlikely that the North Koreans will back down unless the United States meets this basic demand. Washington's pledge of no direct talks could be finessed through secret discussions with a trusted emissary like former Secretary of State Jim Baker, who earlier this week said, "It's not appeasement to talk to your enemies."

What must be avoided is to leave a beleaguered nuclear nation convinced that it is permanently excluded from the international community, its existence threatened, its people suffering horrible deprivation and its hard-liners in total control of military and political policy.

Months before 9/11 and the "global war on terror" - and two years before the Iraq War - George W. Bush tested out his tough-talkin' diplomacy on communist North Korea. Bush combined harsh rhetoric and intimidating tactics to demonstrate to Pyongyang that there was a swaggering new sheriff in town.

In his first weeks in office, Bush cast aside the Clinton administration's delicate negotiations that had hemmed in North Korea's nuclear ambitions. The new President then brushed aside worries of Secretary of State Colin Powell and South Korean President Kim Dae Jung about dangerous consequences from a confrontation.

At a March 2001 summit, Bush rejected Kim Dae Jung's détente strategy for dealing with North Korea, a humiliation for both Kim, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Powell, who wanted to continue pursuing the negotiation track. Instead, Bush cut off nuclear talks with North Korea and stepped up spending on a "Star Wars" missile shield.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Bush got tougher still, vowing to "rid the world of evil" and listing North Korea as part of the "axis of evil."

More substantively, Bush sent to Congress a "nuclear posture review," which laid out future U.S. strategy for deploying nuclear weapons. Leaked in 2002, the so-called NPR put North Korea on a list of potential targets for U.S. nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration also discussed lowering the threshold for the use of U.S. nuclear weapons by making low-yield tactical nukes available for some battlefield situations.

By putting North Korea on the nuclear target list, Bush reversed President Clinton's commitment against targeting non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons. Clinton's idea was that a U.S. promise not to nuke non-nuclear states would reduce their incentives for joining the nuclear club.

But to Bush and his neoconservative advisers, Clinton's assurance that non-nuclear states wouldn't be nuked was just another example of Clinton's appeasement of U.S. adversaries. By contrast, Bush was determined to bring these "evil" states to their knees.

In March 2002, however, Pyongyang signaled how it would react, warning of "strong countermeasures" against Bush's nuclear policy shifts.

North Korea accused the Bush administration of "an inhuman plan to spark a global nuclear arms race" and warned that it would "not remain a passive onlooker" after being put on the Pentagon's list of nuclear targets.

A commentary by the official Korean Central News Agency cited Bush's threat in the context of the U.S. nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

"If the U.S. intends to mount a nuclear attack on any part of the D.P.R.K. [North Korea] just as it did on Hiroshima, it is grossly mistaken," the communiqué read.

In March 2002, the New York Times reported that "North Korea threatened ... to withdraw from the [1994 nuclear suspension] agreement if the Bush administration persisted with what North Korea called a 'hard-line' policy that differed from the Clinton administration's approach. North Korea also renewed its complaints against delays in construction of two nuclear reactors promised in the 1994 agreement to fulfill its energy needs." [NYT, March 14, 2002]

The North Koreans were telegraphing how they would respond to Bush's nuclear saber-rattling. They would create a nuclear threat of their own.

But Bush was in no mood to seek accommodation with North Korea. During one lectern-pounding tirade before congressional Republicans in May 2002, Bush denounced North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il as a "pygmy" and "a spoiled child at a dinner table," Newsweek magazine reported.

Clearly, North Korea was on Bush's menu for "regime change," but it wasn't the first course. The "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive wars was to have its first test in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein, along with his two sons and top associates, would face elimination.

Worrying Signs

By early July 2002, U.S. intelligence agencies had picked up evidence that North Korea had acquired key equipment for enriching uranium.

"On Sept. 12, [2002], the same day Mr. Bush addressed the U.N. about the dangers posed by Iraq, the President met quietly in New York with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to brief him on the U.S. intelligence findings about North Korea," the Wall Street Journal reported. [WSJ, Oct. 18, 2002]

In early October 2002, U.S. diplomats confronted Pyongyang with this evidence and were surprised when North Korean leaders admitted that they were working on building nuclear weapons.

Despite North Korea's public warnings seven months earlier, official Washington was stunned. Many analysts puzzled over what might have caused Pyongyang to violate its earlier promises about suspending its nuclear program and then admit to it. Bush formally canceled the 1994 agreement.

For its part, North Korea issued a press release at the United Nations on Oct. 25, 2002, explaining its reasoning. The statement cited both Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric and the administration's decision to target North Korea for a possible preemptive nuclear strike.

"This was a clear declaration of war against the D.P.R.K. as it totally nullified" the 1994 agreement, the North Korean statement read. "Nobody would be so naïve as to think that the D.P.R.K. would sit idle under such a situation. ... The D.P.R.K., which values sovereignty more than life, was left with no other proper answer to the U.S. behaving so arrogantly and impertinently."

Bush's supporters blamed North Korea's defiance on Clinton, arguing that his 1994 agreement to stop North Korea's nuclear program was too weak. According to aides, Bush said he would never go down the path of compromise that Clinton followed. North Korea "would not be rewarded for bad behavior," Bush aides told reporters. [NYT, Oct. 26, 2002]

Amid Bush's stratospheric poll numbers in fall 2002, few Washington voices dared challenge the Bush administration's finger-pointing at Clinton.

Iraq Lesson

What then happened in Iraq only reinforced North Korea's thinking. Despite Saddam Hussein's assurances that he had no weapons of mass destruction and his granting permission to U.N. inspectors to search any suspicious site, Bush simply ignored the U.N.'s negative findings and invaded anyway on March 19, 2003.

Within three weeks, U.S. forces routed the overmatched Iraqi army and toppled Hussein's government. Later, Hussein's two sons were hunted down and killed by U.S. troops, and the Iraqi dictator was captured.

Humiliating photos of Hussein being examined by doctors and sitting in his underwear were distributed around the world. He was then put on trial in Iraq - rather than before an international tribunal at The Hague - so the proceedings could end with his execution by hanging, an expected outcome that Bush relished.

The war's consequences for Iraqis over the past 3 ½ years also have been horrific. Tens of thousands of Iraqis - men, women and children - have died; the once-prosperous country has sunk into chaos and poverty; ethnic cleansing and a bloody civil war have begun.

While Bush may have intended the Iraq War to be an object lesson about the futility of defying his will, some American adversaries learned something else - that disarmament and cooperation with the U.N. are for suckers.

After all, Hussein had complied with U.N. demands for eliminating his stockpiles of unconventional weapons and had forsaken active development of nuclear weapons. He even agreed to unfettered U.N. inspections.

Hussein's reward was to see his two sons killed, his country ravaged, and the almost certain end of his own life coming as he dangles from the end of a rope, rather than his request that he die before a firing squad.

So, instead of cowering before Bush and his Doctrine, North Korea pressed ahead with its nuclear program, claiming to have detonated a small nuclear device on Oct. 9.

US Reaction

Bush responded to the news with more threats and more tough rhetoric, calling the explosion a "provocative act" and "a threat to international peace and security."

For their part, Democrats argued that Bush's Iraq War had distracted the United States from addressing the worse threat from North Korea.

"What it tells you is that we started at the wrong end of the 'axis of evil'" said former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia. "We started with the least dangerous of the countries, Iraq, and we knew it at the time. And now we have to deal with that." [NYT, Oct. 10, 2006]

Another lesson that could be drawn from Bush's cowboy rhetoric is that tough-talkin' diplomacy may play well with loudmouth TV pundits, newspaper columnists and radio hosts. But it doesn't necessarily serve America's national security interests very well.

In a Consortiumnews.com story entitled "Deeper Into the Big Muddy," published nearly four years ago on Oct. 27, 2002, I wrote:

As world leaders have known for centuries, belligerent words and bellicose actions can have real consequences. Sometimes, potential enemies take hostile gestures more seriously than they are meant and events spiral out of control. That's what appears to have happened with North Korea's nuclear-bomb program. ...

Potential enemies may come to think that the best way to protect their nations against Bush's unilateralist policies and threats of invasions is to quickly add a nuclear bomb or two to the ar5enal."

In the past four years, Bush's tough-talkin' diplomacy has led the United States ever deeper - now neck deep - into the "big muddy."

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'