To Bomb or Not to Bomb at No Man’s Blog

I still can’t help wondering what really happened in North Korea at 0136GMT on October 9, 2006. Did the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea actually detonate a nuclear device at Hwade-ri? Having watched CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC almost continuously for the past Dapper Kim 48 hours, it seems that the experts aren’t quite sure of anything. First of all, the yield of the weapon seems suspiciously low: the equivalent of 550 tons of TNT is what we’re being told. That’s roughly half a kiloton—far less than the bomb America dropped on Hiroshima way back in 1945. Some of the pundits are suggesting that they purposely detonated a relatively small device in order to conserve fissile material. Others are saying that the test somehow went wrong and yielded far less explosive force than anticipated by the North Korean regime. Another possibility, and one that occurred to me as soon as I heard about the low yield of the explosion, was that Kim Chong Il had simply stuffed an abandoned mine shaft with as much conventional high explosives as he could get his hands on and lit it off (hoping to fool the rest of us into believing he had set off a nuke).

The salient point, however, is that North Korea was careful to notify the Chinese government of its intentions shortly before making the big bang. And that means they wanted the outside world to believe that they had successfully popped off a nuke. And that, in turn, means that they wanted (more) attention. Well, they got what they wanted. On the day of the event, the 24-hour news outlets devoted nearly all of their airtime to the “North Korean nuclear crisis”. (The only other news story that had any real legs that day was the Mark Foley mess.)

And now a number of nations are calling for a lesser or greater degree of punitive action to be taken against the Hermit Regime. Of course, any such “action” would occur under the aegis of the United Nations Security Council, presumably involving a Chapter VII resolution. (If everyone with a veto card can get on the same sheet of music, that is.) And as we all know, United Nations Security Council resolutions generally have the teeth of a de-fanged and neutered Chihuahua.

One television pundit made a suggestion that sounded particularly unappealing to me: a naval blockade of all shipping going in and out of North Korean ports. Under this scenario, all vessels would be stopped and searched for nuclear- and missile-related goods and luxury merchandise only. The theory here is that such a blockade would penalize the military and political elite without imposing any further duress on an already starving North Korean citizenry. And this would be important to both the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Korea. Neither one of these countries, you see, would be interested in destabilizing the North Korean regime to a degree that might cause tens of thousand of hungry refugees to come streaming across the borders into neighboring territory. Then it would really become their problem. (Go here for details on South Korea’s so-called “Sunshine Policy” toward its northern neighbor.)