Right Wing Nut House

There’s news from the nuclear minor leagues. Apparently both North Korea and Iran seem hell bent on breaking into the majors any way they can. First, this from the New York Times:

The Bush administration on Sunday warned North Korea for the first time that if it conducted a nuclear test, the United States and several Pacific powers would take punitive action, but officials stopped short of saying what kind of sanctions would result.

“Action would have to be taken,” Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush’s national security adviser, said on the CNN program “Late Edition.” Asked earlier on “Fox News Sunday” about recent reports that intelligence agencies have warned that North Korea could conduct its first test, Mr. Hadley added: “We’ve seen some evidence that says that they may be preparing for a nuclear test. We have talked to our allies about that.”

But he cautioned that North Korea was “a hard target” and that correctly assessing its intentions was nearly impossible.

What kind of “action” would be taken? Japan, who’s direcly under the gun of the nutty NoKo’s and their certifiably insane leader Kim Jong Il, may take the issue to the Security Council:

On Sunday afternoon, senior administration officials said that concerns about baiting North Korea helped to explain why Mr. Hadley did not specify what kind of penalty was possible. Instead, Mr. Hadley noted that “the Japanese are out today already saying that those steps would need to include going to the Security Council and, potentially, sanctions.”

He appeared to be referring to comments by Shinzo Abe, the secretary general of Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party. Returning to Japan from a recent trip to Washington - where he met Mr. Hadley, Vice President Dick Cheney and others - Mr. Abe said Japan faced the most direct threat if North Korea proved that it could detonate a nuclear weapon.

“If North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons becomes definite,” Mr. Abe said on Asahi TV, and North Korea “conducts nuclear testing, for instance, Japan will naturally bring the issue to the U.N. and call for sanctions against North Korea.”

Unfortunately as I’ve pointed out here, China has gone on record saying that UN sanctions against North Korea (and probably Iran) are not the answer. That means that if Japan and the US take the DPRK to the UN, China will almost certainly veto any sanctions resolution. And given the timidity of the International Atomic Energy Agency and their nuclear enabling leader Mohamed ElBaradie it’s doubtful any sanctions would be forthcoming even if China abstained on a sanctions vote. The IAEA under Mr. ElBaradei has taken the attitude that “if we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist” when it comes to the North Koreans. Even a DPRK test of a nuclear weapon would probably not move that agency to recommend sanctions.

On the good news front, the North and South are about ready to re-open talks at the staff level in order to facilitate a meeting between high level officials later this year:

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and South Korea resumed working-level talks on Monday in the DPRK, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)reported.

The inter-Korean talks, reopened in the southern border city of Kaesong after a 10-month suspension, were attended by two delegations led by Kim Man-gil, deputy director of the Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland from the DPRK, and Rhee Bong-jo, South Korea’s vice-minister of Unification, the report said.

For his part, according to Seoul-based Yonhap News, Rhee called on the north side to normalize suspended inter-Korean relations and rejoin six-party talks over the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula.

“We told the North Korean side that if it comes out to the dialogue table, we’ll make important proposals for practical gains in talks aimed at resolving the nuclear issue,” the chief South Korean delegate told reporters.

With both South Korea and China now urging resumption of the six-way talks, Kim may be threatening to test a nuclear weapon in order to pressure the two nations to grant him major concessions before the talks could resume. Tech transfers from South Korea and more food and fuel from China would probably be on the table.

Meanwhile, the radioactive mullahs are quaking in their slippers now that France, Germany and Great Britain have sent them the dreaded “toughly worded letter” about resuming their not so secret uranium enrichment program. This hasn’t phased the mullahs that much. They’ve just warned the Europeans that they have one last chance to make a deal:

Iran said Monday it will give the European Union a last chance to salvage a nuclear deal at talks on May 23 before it resumes atomic work which Washington fears is part of a weapons program.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi told the official IRNA news agency that Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Hassan Rohani would meet the foreign ministers of France, Britain and Germany on May 23 to try to reach an 11th-hour compromise.

But Iran has become frustrated with the talks and said it would restart making nuclear fuel, an action that would marshal the Europeans behind U.S. attempts to haul Tehran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.

Iran said it would give ministerial level talks one last shot before announcing the return to making atomic fuel.

The Iranian parliament has already voted to go ahead with an accelerated enrichment program that most experts agree would allow the mullahs to have a weapon by year’s end. But according to the Lebanon Daily Star, they may continue to delay the start up of the enrichment process - if they get some satisfaction from the Europeans:

Iran said Sunday it was postponing its threatened resumption of sensitive nuclear activities, but insisted the climbdown was merely a temporary gesture ahead of “last chance” emergency talks with European officials.

The move came hours after a defiant Iranian Parliament voted to oblige the government to develop a nuclear fuel cycle - which would include the controversial process of enriching uranium.

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, warned that long-term nuclear negotiations could not continue without Iran first resuming uranium work.

“We cannot continue the negotiations with the Europeans without having resumed some of our activities,” Rowhani told state television, adding Iran’s decision to resume conversion of uranium - a precursor to enrichment - was “still valid.”

Clearly Iran wants some kind of concession from the Europeans on enrichment. They may wish to present the Europeans with a fait accompli regarding some kind of enrichment (there’s a way to enrich uranium that would be slower and have a lower yield of bomb-grade uranium) which might satisfy the appeasers in Germany and France. The mullah’s goal has to be to split the Europeans off from the Americans. Even picking off France would be a victory and probably result in a failure to impose UN sanctions if we took the Iranians before the Security Council.

We’re now poised on the razor’s edge. Will it be confrontation? Or will we be able to get the rest of the world to stand with us and prevent two states - Iran and North Korea - from getting these enormously destablising weapons? I’m not confident that a confrontation with Iran can be avoided. North Korea however, is so desperately poor that given the right incentives and some pressure by the Chinese and South Koreans, we may be able to roll back Kim’s mad nuclear scheme that has bankrupted his country.

Post Script: For a good laugh, check out the North Korean website. I definitely want to get me some of them badges!

The real joke? Click on the link marked “shopping.”