Axis Of Nukes

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 8/25/2006

Weapons Of Mass Destruction: In what should be a loud wake-up call for the U.S. and its allies, South Korea's defense minister says it's now likely North Korea has at least one nuclear bomb and maybe two.

Rogue regimes with nukes are no longer a hypothetical threat. They're all too real, and to stop the trend we have to do something other than talk.

Speaking to the media Thursday, South Korean defense chief Yoon Kwang-ung asserted there was no longer any doubt that North Korea had "one or two" nuclear weapons. There's also growing evidence, he said, that North Korea is readying its first nuclear weapons test.

This clearly demonstrates the failure of the Clinton-era policy of endless negotiations and lavish incentives as means for halting the spread of nuclear weapons.

As we now know, the North Koreans — right after agreeing with Clinton's special envoy Jimmy Carter to end their nuclear program in exchange for billions in aid and access to commercial nuclear technology — began cheating. Such was their contempt for Clinton, for Carter and for America's resolve to stop them. We talked, they built.

Today, North Korea has a weapon with which to threaten us and our allies — a weapon it should not have. And its Taepodong-2 missile potentially puts the weapon in range of the West Coast.

What now? Further negotiations don't hold out much prospect, since we appear to have given North Korea the greatest leverage a nation could have in security negotiations — nuclear weapons.

But if we do talk, we'd better be clear in what we say — and prepared to back it up. If we say it's "unacceptable" for North Korea to have weapons, it means talk must end. We can still take out its nuclear weapons, but not with diplomacy.

The mistakes we've made with North Korea hold important lessons for an even more serious problem: the burgeoning nuclear program under way in Iran, a program that probably will produce a nuclear weapon within a few years.

As we noted last week, a new report from the House Committee on Intelligence is sounding the alarm over the Iran threat. "Iran's support of radical Islamists with weapons and money demonstrates in real terms the danger it poses to America and our allies," said the committee's chairman, Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich.

The report (at http://intelligence.house.gov/Media/PDFS/IranReport082206v2.pdf) is sobering. It outlines what we know of Iran's efforts to build a nuclear weapon — and the sophisticated missiles it's building to deliver them.

Its Shahab-3 missile already puts any Iranian nuke in range of Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, India and southeast Europe. Its next-generation missile — the 2,500-mile Shahab-4 — will be able to hit Germany, Italy and Moscow.

Iran's nuclear buildup continues apace. On Friday, an exile group that's provided accurate information in the past said Iran has 15 advanced P-2 centrifuges. These are four times more efficient than Iran's 164 older P-1 centrifuges and will speed Iran's attempts to turn uranium into fissionable, bomb-grade material.

Events are moving fast. Now that we have strong reason to believe North Korea — Iran's friend and partner — has a nuclear weapon, will we just stand by and let Iran have one too?