(Almost) Little To Worry About North Korea

In a new twist of the “politics of the tantrum”, North Korea has shown the door, threatened to show the door or told the world it is thinking about showing the door to the UN Atomic Energy inspectors (profoundly sad, no doubt, for being sent back where possessing a shortwaver radio is not a criminal offence). Pyongyang’s reaction to the UN Security Council latest feeble condemnation is so sudden and over the top, there is little to read into it politically (apart perhaps as yet episode in the Kim-succession saga).

One has to remember that North Korea has built and detonated an atom bomb a few years ago, but alas the boom was not big enough to make it a serious weapon. Now they have launched a satellite towards orbit, but alas the rocket was not strong enough to make it a serious weapon either (“going to orbit” is not militarily important as much as being able to reach the necessary speed. And the North Korean missile did not go fast enough).

At best there will be more puffing, more huffing, and the negotiations will start again. If the current dictator dies, there will be plenty of turmoil and maybe even the chance for Reunification.

Trouble is, at worst the North Koreans will explode an atom bomb in the atmosphere. Even if only unwittingly. And that is plenty to worry about.

Back to Basics on Iran and the Bomb

Oceans of ink are being wasted without addressing the most basic issue regarding Iran and its nuclear weapons program. The latest example is Peter D. Zimmerman’s op-ed, “Nearer to the Bomb” (IHT, July 8), where we are treated to 674 words in order to state the most obvious of facts (“the real purpose of Iranian enrichment is to provide fuel for weapons, not reactors“).

However, not a comma is dedicated to the problem of Iran’s own security, regularly and openly threatened with talks of war and mentions of foreign-supported “regime change”.

Have we learned really nothing from years of negotiations going nowhere, of sanctions resulting in nothing, and of incentives regularly failing to persuade successive Iranian Presidents and negotiators? Does anybody seriously think that Iran can afford, at this stage, to remain nuclearly unarmed?

Mr Zimmermann rather tellingly is able to contemplate harsh sanctions but only “modest low-calorie sweeteners“. That is exactly the kind of attitude that has brought the “Iran Bomb” issue where it stands at the moment.

When and where will the EU or the USA find instead the courage to offer full security guarantees to the Islamic Republic, in order to achieve a less nuclear, more secure world?

Iran and the Rationality of the First Nuclear War

Iran is right in trying to develop the Bomb: what else they should do, when violent foreign-sponsored political upheavals in Tehran appear in the news twice a month if not more often? (An example in Italian and another in English).

People like Michael Leeden are so preoccupied of the “Iran Bomb”, they are trying their best to make it explode.

What if they’d focus their minds not on the 1930’s and Hitler, rather on 1914, and on how a climate of distrust plus a longing for a resolutive war led many nations in a war with millions of dead (including European civilization).

How “enticing” (not!) will it be when Tehran or Tel Aviv will be pulverised, a few atom bombs will go off in other places, and then fifty or more years later flocks of scholars will be able to build their careers in the attempt of explaining how, even if all the “actors” in the crisis behaved rationally, the end result was the most gigantic idiocy in the history of the world, the First Nuclear War.