Earlier this month, Barack Obama told an audience in the Czech Republic that he will work towards a world free of nuclear weapons. Yesterday, the crackpot dictatorship of North Korea vowed to restart a nuclear program it had recently halted, surely with the intention of building more bombs capable of incinerating thousands of people in a moment. The bellicose announcement comes in response to a United Nations condemnation of North Korea's recent missile test--a technical flop that refocused world attention on a regime led by someone who, as an Asia expert once explained to me, acts like a child in a high chair, screaming and flinging food around the kitchen in a spastic bid for attention.
Of course, this child--the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Il--happens to have several nuclear bombs in his toy box. But the real worry is not that he will create a mushroom cloud of out pique; few people think Kim would court suicide that way. The bigger cause for alarm is that Kim might sell off nuclear plans, materials, or perhaps even weapons to the highest bidder. In 2007 North Korea was exposed for having helped Syria build a nuclear reactor demolished in a pre-emptive Israeli strike. Now comes a new report from the Nikkei news service, citing Western intelligence officials, that North Korea may have shipped "several dozen tons of enriched uranium" to Iran this winter.
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