North orea--The World's Nuclear War Head Boutique

I got the sad news on Saturday that North Korea had detonated a nuclear devise underground. It was rated as a nuclear weapon equal in destructive power to the 20 kiloton bomb that destroyed Hiroshima on August 6,1945.

Such a nuclear weapon is not cheap or easy to build. One has to ask the question as follows:

"How does a bankrupt state with people living in starvation and without even the money to pay to keep the electricity going, get the money and technology to build such a weapon?"

Conventional wisdom is that Pakistan was supplying them with the technology in the past. Since the infamous Khan network was allegedly disbanded and the leading nuclear physicist placed under house arrest, that source of money and technology has appeared to have dried up. Or has it?

Iran is always another suspect. Why do they need North Korea if they are developing their own nuclear weapons?

A lot of people take comfort in the fact that the North Korean regime is a group of low-level delinquents putting on a show. All that is needed is a big enough payoff to calm down the broke regime. President George Bush tried that for a while. He had some good progress with the nuclear weapons program being stopped and even reactors shut down. When the US failed to keep up the payments and take North Korea off the list of states sponsoring terrorism, the agreement collapsed and we have this new show of their prowess with manufacturing nuclear weapons.

Let us "think out of the box" and consider another far more sinister scenario. Iran recently fired off a rocket with a 1200 mile range. This sent shutters through out the world and even caused the gold price to go up. In the old days of Nazi Germany and the Cold War, weapons were delivered with rockets, No more. The minute you fire a rocket into the atmosphere, satellites all over the world see where it is coming from and where it is going. It would be relatively easy to perhaps shoot the rocket down or to fire a retaliatory strike.

In the future if some rogue state or terrorist group decides to detonate a nuclear weapon on a city or other target of high strategic value, you will see the scenario that Tom Clancy put forth in his 1992 book The Sum of All Their Fears. In this book terrorist smuggle a small tactical nuclear warhead into the US and detonate it in Denver during the Super Bowl. The results were 200,000 casualties.

Dr. Robert Zubrin wrote an excellent book called Energy Victory. The main theme of the book was a plan to make the US energy independent based upon the model that worked well in Brasil. Dr. Zubrin devotes several chapers of this excellent book to terrorist groups and rich oil interests in the Middle East who are supported by oil money. This is our first clue.

Our second clue comes from a grudging admission made sometime ago by the US government. They admitted that 22 teams of highly-specialized scientists are on standby all over the US. If a nuclear weapon is detonated in the US or in an allied country, a team would be dispatched. Their primary job would be nuclear forensic work. The goal of this exercise would be to determine where the nuclear weapon came from so retaliation could be carried all. All of this is administered through the US Department of Energy. The career civil servant in charge of preventing nuclear terrorism admits that he does not sleep well at night. To spend this much money and devote this many personnel to such a project, it would appear that the US government considers such an attack inevitable.

Where is all of this leading? Quite simply, someone put up the capital to turn North Korea into a factory for nuclear war heads. As long as the US was "paying off" it was easy to take the money and avoid the risk of nuclear anihalation if one of their bombs was used against a city, for example.

Now the North Koreans see that they can make unlimited sums of money by making nuclear weapons for other clients around the world who would pay huge sums of money for such a weapon. They think that their old ally China will protect them from nuclear retaliation, even if one of their weapons is used. They are blinded by greed and making a fatal miscalculation. Sadly millions of people could suffer and die because of this amoral state.