North Korea Nuke Test Derails Iran Invasion? Has Rummy's madcap dictator arming resulted in a blowback that undermines the Neo-Con war machine? Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com October 9 2006 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. *** Reported Test "Fundamentally Changes the Landscape" for US Officials By Glenn Kessler The Washington Post Monday 09 October 2006 North Korea's apparent nuclear test last night may well be regarded as a failure of the Bush administration's nuclear nonproliferation policy. Since George W. Bush became president, North Korea has restarted its nuclear reactor and increased its stock of weapons-grade plutonium, so it may now have enough for 10 or 11 weapons, compared with one or two when Bush took office. North Korea's test could also unleash a nuclear arms race in Asia, with Japan and South Korea feeling pressure to build nuclear weapons for defensive reasons. Yet a number of senior U.S. officials have said privately that they would welcome a North Korean test, regarding it as a clarifying event that would forever end the debate within the Bush administration about whether to solve the problem through diplomacy or through tough actions designed to destabilize North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's grip on power. Now U.S. officials will push for tough sanctions at the U.N. Security Council, and are considering a raft of largely unilateral measures, including stopping and inspecting every ship that goes in and out of North Korea. "This fundamentally changes the landscape now," one U.S. official said last night. When Bush became president in 2000, Pyongyang's reactor was frozen under a 1994 agreement with the United States. Clinton administration officials thought they were so close to a deal limiting North Korean missiles that in the days before he left office, Bill Clinton seriously considered making the first visit to Pyongyang by a U.S. president. But conservatives had long been deeply skeptical of the deal freezing North Korea's program - known as the Agreed Framework - in part because it called for building two light-water nuclear reactors (largely funded by the Japanese and South Koreans). When then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell publicly said in early 2001 that he favored continuing Clinton's approach, Bush rebuked him. Bush then labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil" that included Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, further riling Pyongyang. U.S. officials say Bush carried a deep, visceral hatred of Kim and his dictatorial regime, and often chafed at efforts by his advisers to tone down his language about Kim, who within North Korea is regarded as a near-deity. The missile negotiations with North Korea ended and no talks were held between senior U.S. and North Korean officials for nearly two years. Many top U.S. officials were determined to kill the Agreed Framework, and when U.S. intelligence discovered evidence that North Korea had a clandestine program to enrich uranium, they had their chance. A U.S. delegation confronted Pyongyang about the secret program - and U.S. officials said North Korean officials appeared to confirm it. (Pyongyang later denied that.) The United States pressed to cut off immediately deliveries of heavy fuel oil promised under the Agreed Framework. North Korea, in response, evicted international inspectors and restarted its nuclear reactor. Pyongyang moved quickly to reprocess 8,000 spent fuel rods - previously in a cooling pond under 24-hour international surveillance - in order to obtain the plutonium needed for nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the Bush administration, hampered by internal disputes, struggled to fashion a diplomatic effort to confront North Korea. Unlike the Clinton administration - which suggested to North Korea that it would attack if Pyongyang moved to reprocess the plutonium - the Bush administration never set out "red lines" that North Korea must not cross. Bush administration officials argued that doing so would only tempt North Korea to cross those lines. Whereas Clinton had reached the Agreed Framework through lengthy bilateral negotiations, the Bush administration felt that North Korea would be less likely to wiggle out of a future deal if it also included its regional neighbors - China, South Korea, Japan and Russia. But it took months of internal struggles to arrange the meetings - and North Korea insisted it wanted to have only bilateral talks with the United States. It was also difficult to coordinate policies with the other parties. The talks largely stalled, as North Korea continued to build its stockpile of plutonium. After Bush was reelected, new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice launched an effort to revitalize the six-nation talks, which a year ago yielded a "statement of principles" to guide future negotiations, including the possibility of major economic help, security assurances and normalization of relations with the United States if North Korea dismantled its nuclear programs. To the anger of conservatives within the administration, the statement also suggested that North Korea might one day be supplied with light-water reactors as envisioned in the Clinton deal. But that proved to be the high point of the talks. The administration issued a statement saying the reactor project was officially terminated - and North Korea would need to pass many hurdles before it could ever envision having a civilian nuclear program. The Treasury Department, meanwhile, focused on North Korea illicit counterfeiting activities, targeting a bank in Macao that reportedly held the personal accounts of Kim and his family. Many banks around the world began to refuse to deal with North Korean companies, further angering Pyongyang. With the end of the negotiating track marking the likely advent of sanctions, Pyongyang's action will test the proposition of those Bush administration officials who argued that a confrontational approach would finally bring North Korea to heel. *** Neo-Cons Spin Dud Test To Hide Nuclear Hypocrisy Drudge Report, Washington Times downplay blast to conceal stupidity of attacking Iran, source of North Korean nukes being Rumsfeld and Bush protected networks Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com October 10 2006 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 arsenal 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. *** North Korea's bomb By John Chuckman Online Journal Contributing Writer Oct 13, 2006 You might think from all the political noise that something extraordinary happened when North Korea conducted an underground nuclear explosion. But let's put the test, apparently a small-yield, inefficient device, into some perspective. The United States has conducted 1,127 nuclear and thermonuclear tests, including 217 in the atmosphere. The Soviet Union/ Russia conducted 969 tests, including 219 in the atmosphere. France, 210, including 50 in the atmosphere. The United Kingdom, 45, with 21 in the atmosphere. China, 45, with 23 in the atmosphere. India and Pakistan, 13, all underground. South Africa (and/or Israel) one atmospheric test in 1979. From a purely statistical point of view, North Korea's test does seem a rather small event. You must add the fact that my title, North Korea's Bomb, is aimed at being pithy and is thereby unavoidably inaccurate. Having a nuclear device is not the same thing as having a bomb or warhead, much less a compact and efficient bomb or warhead. North Korea still has a long way to go. But North Korea's test is magnified in its effect by several circumstances. First, war in the Korean peninsula has never formally ended, and American troops might well be vulnerable to even a school bus with a nuclear device. Just that thought is probably horrifying to many Americans who are not used to being challenged abroad, but I'm sure North Korea has already been warned that that would constitute national suicide. Two, the test comes when Bush has been exploring military means to end Iran's work with nuclear upgrading technology. There is no proof that Iran intends to create nuclear weapons, but, being realistic, I think we have to say it's likely. Iran faces nuclear-armed countries, hostile to its interests, in several directions. Security of its people is an important obligation of any state. I doubt Bush intends invading Iran -- invasion's extreme advocates, neocon storm troopers like David Frum and Richard Perle having proved totally wrong about Iraq -- but that doesn't exclude some form of air attack. Iran has deeply buried its production sites, so the usual American bombers and cruise missiles will be ineffective. There has been talk of using tactical nuclear warheads, but I think there would be overwhelming world revulsion to this. The Pentagon may be considering non-nuclear ICBMs, there having been talk of arming a portion of the American fleet with non-nuclear warheads to exploit the accuracy and momentum of their thousands-of-miles-an-hour strikes for deep penetration. But Russia's missile forces are on hair-trigger alert against the launch of any American ICBM, and the time for confirming error with shorter-range sea-launched missiles is almost nonexistent. Bombardment of Iran may now be more questionable, something we may regard as a good outcome of the North Korean test. How do you justify an attack to prevent the development of nuclear weapons in one country when you have done nothing of the kind in another that actually has them? This is even more true because Iran, while not Arabic, is Islamic, and public relations for America in the Islamic world already are terrible. Third, what many analysts fear most from North Korea is its selling weapons or technology to terrorists. North Korea sells a good deal of its limited military technology to others, although this does not make the country in any way special, the world's largest arms trafficker by far being the United States. Many would argue that American weapons have supported terror, those used in Beirut, for example, ghastly flesh-mangling cluster bombs dropped on civilians. The answer to this fear about North Korea brings us to the simple human matter of talking. The U.S. must give up its arrogant, long-held attitude against talking and dealing with North Korea, for here it is certainly working against its own vital interests. It is an interesting sidelight on North Korea's test that at least portions of its technology came from A. Q. Kahn's under-the-table operations in Pakistan, America's great ally in its pointless war on terror. Perhaps Kim Jong Il should volunteer troops for Iraq. This would undoubtedly change America's view of him dramatically. Cooperation won a lot of benefits for the dictatorship in Pakistan regarded by America as a rogue nuclear state just a few years ago. All completely rational people wish that nuclear weapons did not exist, but wishing is a fool's game. Efforts for general nuclear disarmament are almost certainly doomed to failure at this stage of human history. Why would any of the nuclear powers give up these weapons? They magnify the influence and prestige of the nations that have them. And why should other nations, facing both the immense power of the United States and its often-bullying tactics, give up obtaining them? Moreover, technology in any field improves and comes down in cost over time, and it will undoubtedly prove so with making nuclear weapons. The entire Western world has conspired to remain silent on Israel's nuclear arms, even when Israel assisted apartheid South Africa to build a nuclear weapon. If nuclear weapons are foolish and useless, why does little Israel possess them? Why did South Africa want them? Why did the Soviet Union, despite a great depression and horrible impoverishment after the collapse of communism, keep its costly nuclear arsenal? If Western nations can understand the dark fear that drives Israel, why can they not understand the same thing for North Korea? The United States has refused for years to talk and has threatened and punished North Korea in countless ways. When the U.S., under Clinton, did agree to peaceful incentives for North Korea to abandon its nuclear work, it later failed utterly to keep its word. Bush has treated the North Koreans with the same dismissive contempt and threatening attitude he has so many others. How on earth was this approach ever to achieve anything other than what it now has produced? We keep hearing that North Korea is irrational and unstable, but I think these descriptions are inaccurate. A regime that has lasted for more than half a century can be called many things, but not unstable. Soviet-style regimes were very stable. It was when such governments attempted reforms and loosened their absolute hold on people's lives that they toppled, but there seems little likelihood of a Gorbachev assuming power in North Korea. North Korea has done some bizarre things over the last 50 years, but I do not think a careful speaker would describe the nation as irrational. North Korea has been isolated and ignored by the United States. It is American policy that frequently has been irrational, Bush's mob having been especially thick in their behavior towards the country. I may be exaggerating when I write of bizarre North Korean acts, for since World War II, what nation has done more bizarre, damaging things than the United States? Over 40 years of costly hostility and terror against Cuba? The insane, pointless war in Vietnam? The insane, pointless invasion of Iraq? Harsh sanctions against North Korea, already advocated by the emotionally-numb Bush, are a foolish response. North Korea's rulers would not suffer any more than did Saddam Hussein under American-imposed sanctions against Iraq after Desert Storm. Only ordinary people would be driven to misery and starvation, just as they were in Iraq where tens of thousands of innocents died. How much easier and more productive just to talk.