Communist North Korea sent geopolitical shockwaves around the planet yesterday by claiming to have conducted a successful test of a powerful hydrogen bomb.
After Syria's civil war, the rise of Islamic State, and the useless nuclear nonproliferation pact with the mullahs of Iran, the North Korean detonation is just the latest foreign policy catastrophe on President Barack Hussein Obama's watch. It was made possible by his inept former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and before that by her husband former President Bill Clinton.
Interestingly, even when North Korea is being deadly serious about something -- well, just about any subject, really -- its pronouncements come across as overheated and cartoonish.
The so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea claims its new "H-bomb of justice" can be loaded onto a missile and delivered to targets outside its borders. Of course, "H-bomb of justice" sounds like something out of a comic book or a sci-fi movie, say perhaps the 1970 flick, Beneath the Planet of the Apes in which mutant humans deified a nuclear missile, referring to it as the holy "Bomb Almighty" and lauding "the Fellowship of the Holy Fallout."
But just because the North Koreans come across as goofy, awkward, and prone to crude propaganda doesn't mean they're lying about their nuclear reach.
Republicans, including GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, blame Hillary, now the Democratic Party's frontrunner, for the situation in North Korea. Trump said Communist China "should solve that problem" or face trade policy retaliation from the U.S. Mrs. Clinton herself said North Korea committed a "dangerous and provocative act" that should be answered with more sanctions and improved missile defenses.
Official North Korean government news agency KCNA said dictator Kim Jong-un ordered the nuclear test at 10 a.m. local time on Wednesday as part of an "all-out charge to bring earlier the final victory of the revolutionary cause of Juche," the name of North Korea's peculiar, religion-like brand of Marxism.
The underground explosion was violent enough to register as a 5.1 magnitude earthquake, according to the U.S. Geologic Survey. South Korean officials said the seismic event took place 30 miles from the Punggye-ri site at which the North had previously conducted nuclear experiments.
Ploughshares Fund is an anti-American philanthropy devoted to undermining U.S. national security
But a leading media-anointed weapons expert who happens to be a radical left-winger says the North Korean announcement was much ado about nothing, and his sentiment was echoed by the Obama White House.
So forget about it, said Joe Cirincione, president of the dangerously kooky far-left Ploughshares Fund, which media outlets have been conned into labeling a "global security organization."
North Korea could have mixed a hydrogen isotope in a normal atomic fission bomb, so it's no big deal. "Because it is, in fact, hydrogen, they could claim it is a hydrogen bomb," said Cirincione who served as an advisor on nuclear policy to presidential candidate Obama in 2008. "But it is not a true fusion bomb capable of the massive multi-megaton yields these bombs produce."
Cirincione and his San Francisco-based organization are longtime apologists for the world's worst dictators and aren't exactly known for honesty. In 2007 he dismissed media reports that Syria was constructing a nuclear reactor with North Korean help, calling them propaganda spread by the U.S. and Israel. As DiscoverTheNetworks reports, "Intelligence officials later produced video evidence definitively establishing the Syrian-North Korean collaboration."
Ploughshares Fund is an anti-American philanthropy devoted to undermining U.S. national security. Ploughshares, which partners with the Institute for Policy Studies, Code Pink, J Street, and United for Peace & Justice, has spent $4 million in the past five years to push a pact with Iran and coordinated with the so-called peace groups and think tanks on its payroll to support the U.S.-led negotiations. The deal also obligates the U.S. government to lobby state and local officials to remove policies that prevent state and local governments from investing in companies that have interests in Iran. Florida and California, for example, have laws that prevent state pension funds from investing in corporations that do business with Iran.
North Korea's disturbing nuclear announcement came after years of appeasement and dithering by misguided left-wing politicians in the West. Chief among those pandering to the totalitarian nation over the years has been former U.S. President Bill Clinton. In 1994 Clinton unveiled an agreement between the U.S. and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea that he claimed would achieve "an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula."
Under the deal, North Korea "agreed to freeze its existing nuclear program and to accept international inspection of all existing facilities," Clinton said.
The pact, he said at the time, "is good for the United States, good for our allies, and good for the safety of the entire world." The agreement is "a crucial step toward drawing North Korea into the global community," he said, implying that taking away the richly deserved pariah status of the brutal, isolated totalitarian state would somehow be a good thing for humanity.
As Daniel Greenfield observes, Clinton's speech two decades ago was "[p]retty much the same speech Obama gave on Iran. So you, and anyone who can count to four, knows how that one is going to end."
Communist North Korea sent geopolitical shockwaves around the planet yesterday by claiming to have conducted a successful test of a powerful hydrogen bomb.
After Syria's civil war, the rise of Islamic State, and the useless nuclear nonproliferation pact with the mullahs of Iran, the North Korean detonation is just the latest foreign policy catastrophe on President Barack Hussein Obama's watch. It was made possible by his inept former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and before that by her husband former President Bill Clinton.
Interestingly, even when North Korea is being deadly serious about something -- well, just about any subject, really -- its pronouncements come across as overheated and cartoonish.
