North Korea

Is the apparent testing of a nuclear bomb in North Korea a week ago threatening or not?

I am inclined to say not. In an article in the Berliner Zeitung an expert says that the explosion was most likely a failed one of a large nuclear device. So, first of all, the test seems to have been unsuccessful. Secondly, as Stephen Colbert half-seriously pointed out on the Colbert Report, Kim Jong-Il has only so much plutonium at his disposal. The more he gets rid of through testing, the less likelihood there is that South Korea and Japan need fear a nuclear attack. Thirdly, North Korea has no effective means of delivering a nuclear bomb. North Korean scientists do not have the technology to make a nuclear warhead. A conventional bomber plane, the mode of delivery for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, is easy to detect by radar and to shoot down.

The other threat people mention is that radioactive material and weaponry will end up being sold to and used by terrorists. I don't know if this is really possible or not. But it seems very far-fetched.

I'd say that the biggest concrete (not theoretical) problem is still the poverty in North Korea. It is on solving this problem that the energy of foreign governments should be concentrated. At the same time, I believe it is best for the six-party diplomatic negotiations to continue, because communication is better than nothing.

Finally, the governments of the United States and of the European Union should not see or treat Kim Jong-Il as an inferior, morally depraved being. Whatever may be his faults, statesmen who start or are complicit in devastating wars out of greed have neither the right nor the credibility to pretend to be superior to anyone. It is deeds, not words, that matter; the deeds of the Bush administration and others prove that theirs is a false morality, and false morality is as deadly as no morality at all.