So it appears that North Korea officially has The Bomb.
We knew they probably did, but until the test that was confirmed Monday night, we couldn’t be sure. We couldn’t be sure that they had the technical capability, the will or the adventurism. Now they’ve publicly shown us what they’ve got in all three areas.
There are three significant issues this raises that are worth discussing at greater length than we’ll do here.
1) The stakes are higher. One of the core disputes between hawks and doves in this conflict is the simple question: Why does terrorism matter so much? Far more people in Israel and the U.S. die from auto accidents.
Well, yes, that’s true — for now. But RAND recently did a study on the impact of one small nuke in Long Beach Harbor, near where I live (Google ‘RAND “Long Beach” nuke’). It’d be easy to do, and the impact would be immense. Do it four times — in Long Beach, Red Hook, Charleston, S.C., and Seattle, and the global just-in-time U.S. economy we’ve built in the last 20 years suddenly doesn’t look like such a good idea.
2) Foley who? We need a strong debate on how to deal with the foreign-policy challenges we’re facing right now, and that policy has to include some strong proposals from the Democratic side of the House (as well as frank talk and fresh thinking from the GOP, please). Just saying “Protect the pages!! And we’re not Bush!!” isn’t going to deal with the genie that is now officially out of the bottle.
Let’s let the parents of the affected pages deal with Foley, and let’s demand that the debate get moved — by both parties — to a substantive discussion on where we go and what we do about the world outside the Beltway.
3) We need a response. I suggested one, back in 2002 — and I see that Ted Koppel has now proposed it again in the International Herald Tribune — the “Godfather defense” which I described then as: “While the tame game-theory model suggests that he and others can be managed successfully through boundary and consequence-setting, the only thing that might work would be something Godfather-like, along the lines of ‘If anything bad happens to me; if I catch a cold and go to the hospital; if I get hit by a car while rollerblading drunk; you will die. You are now the guarantor of my well-being.’”
Simply put, we explain that in the event of a nuclear incident in the West that cannot be explicitly traced to a known source of nuclear weapons, we will immediately decapitate the regimes of Iran and North Korea, and destroy enough of their physical and nuclear infrastructure to make it very, very difficult for them to continue nuclear engineering, whether for peaceful or weapons purposes for a very long time. This would have to be both something supported by the president and overwhelmingly passed by Congress. We’d have to show some clarity and resolve throughout our political class.
The rationales for doing this are simple: Both regimes have cheated on their commitments around the nuclear product chain; both have and are supporting (or simply selling technology to) active terrorists; and neither regime has a government that’s actively suicidal.
It’s not a good defense, or a permanent one — it is as risky and overdone as a shotgun rigged to shoot a burglar. But it’s one way to set a bright line and to buy some time while we try and come up with a better plan.
Here’s a chance for the Democratic Party to get out in front of an issue … along with a lot of other voters, I’ll be watching.
Marc Danziger is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at Windsofchange.net.
