While the country whittle away the time deciding whether or not to put up with serial molestation as the price of avoiding profiling in Airport security, another grim event has occurred halfway around the world:
Scientist: N. Korea Secretly Builds New Nuclear Facility
Published November 21, 2010| Associated Press
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea has secretly and quickly built a new, highly sophisticated facility to enrich uranium, according to an American nuclear
scientist, raising fears that the North is ramping up its atomic program despite international pressure.The scientist, Siegfried Hecker, said in a report posted Saturday that he was taken during a recent trip to the North’s main Yongbyon atomic complex to a facility with a small industrial-scale uranium enrichment facility. The facility had 2,000 recently completed centrifuges, he said, and the North told him it was producing low-enriched uranium meant for a new reactor.
Hecker, a former director of the U.S. Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory who is regularly given rare glimpses of the North’s secretive nuclear program, acknowledged that it was not clear what North Korea stood to gain by showing him the formerly secret area.
North Korea, the evil stepchild of China that Clinton, Albright, and (of course) Jimmy Carter fixed for us in the ’90s is back and badder (and madder) than ever. This is fresh off of the North sinking a South Korean warship (the classic casus belli that we simply politely ignored, projecting the weakness that Obama is coming to be known for) and at a time of potential unrest as Kim Jong Il’s son is being prepared to take the reigns of power in the “People’s Democratic Republic” hereditary fiefdom. There is really no way of knowing what the North Koreans think to gain by revealing this. They are like the wind, they blow hot or cold seemingly at random. Other than unremitting hostility towards the West, they have no apparently consistent policies, aims, or goals.
But their revealing this at this time is interesting. It shows just how terribly Obama’s “New Tone” policy is failing all over the world. As I said, Obama is projecting weakness like a limping wildebeest on the African plain, and the lions and jackals are gathering. Elections have consequences, and Obama is a multiple-failures kind of guy. While we are being sexually assaulted in the name of security from terrorists at home, it is comforting to know that that same level of competence is keeping watch on nuclear proliferation abroad.
