Well, it’s lookin’ more and more that way alright. Allah and the gang at HotAir.com were kickin’ this topic around last night and came up with this:

Even a small nuclear explosion would yield a blast equivalent to a few thousand tons of TNT. This one was in the ballpark of 500.

That’s pretty small, but would take a lot, a whole 500 tons worth, of conventional explosives to make a bang even that big. Allah addresses that too:

Update: A 500-ton blast would have required a sufficiently large amount of conventional explosives that U.S. spy satellites would have noticed them being brought to the site, notes the Times. WaPo says the NorKs told China that they were aiming for a four kiloton explosion, but by almost all accounts, they didn’t manage even a kiloton and could have fallen as low as 200 tons.

Once the radiation sniffing data is analyzed, we’ll know for sure, but it sure looks like a misfire of an actual nuclear test, and not a ruse. So that begs the question, what to do about this regime run by a certified lunatic? Dean Barnett over at Hugh Hewitt’s Townhall.com blog asks and answers:

Q. So what’s the answer? War?

The Financial Times editorialized today that “war is unlikely because the US has little stomach for it.” But whether we have the stomach for it or not, there’s going to be a lot of war in our future. We didn’t have the stomach for 9/11 – it would have been nice if Al Qaeda had consulted us vís a vis our stomach situation before launching those attacks. Alas, maniacal enemies are usually indifferent to such concerns.

My biggest hope is that this serves as a teachable moment. The world is growing more dangerous by the day. That won’t stop until America stops it. There’s only one political party that has the insight and intellectual honesty to bring this message to the people. It’s time we get busy.

Q. So will we be at war with North Korea?

There’s a good chance that war there can be forestalled until the regime collapses. But we won’t have any such luck with the Middle Eastern lunatics who devote every moment when they’re not killing each other to plotting our demise.

Count on it.

According to this AP report on USA Today, the Bush administration is sending some mixed signals:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday the United States would not attack North Korea, rejecting a suggestion that Pyongyang may feel it needs nuclear weapons to stave off an Iraq-style U.S. invasion.

President Bush, Rice said, has told “the North Koreans that there is no intention to invade or attack them. So they have that guarantee. … I don’t know what more they want.”

Rice told CNN television that Bush “never takes any of his options off the table. But is the United States, somehow, in a provocative way, trying to invade North Korea? It’s just not the case.”

Uhhh, OK. At least they’re trying to hold ol’ Kim Jong Il’s feet to some kind of fire. Looking for some quick Democrat reaction, instead I see more of the World coming down hard on the NoKos, the Japanese could use this to become a military force once again, and good ol’ John McCain decides it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault.

But what about the Democrats’ reaction? The Conservative Voice has this:

The mainstream media and Democrat leaders have come out strongly in their condemnations of President Bush, over North Korea’s nuclear test on Monday. Missing from their denunciations is any mention of President Clinton’s 1994 Light Water Reactor program that is said to have begun the process, which led to the current global crisis.

The Clinton Administration’s North Korea nuclear reactor program, dubbed “Sunshine Diplomacy”, provided the Plutonium that was apparently diverted and is currently being used to fuel North Korea’s nuclear weapons’ program.

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) commented Monday that the cause of the North Korean nuke test was due to “the failed Bush Administration’s policy”. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) followed Clinton with: “While we’ve been bogged down in Iraq where there were no weapons of mass destruction, a madman has apparently tested the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.”

Wouldn’t it be just peachy if we could only close our eyes, take a deep breath, maybe chant a few mantras — John Kerry could wave his magic hat — and all this would go away? Wait! That’s the Democrat’s plan.

Vote Republican in Nov., ’cause those other guys are gonna get us all killed! (db)

Technorati Tags: North Korea Nuclear Test, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 3:58 pm and is filed under A Post 9/11 World, No. Korean Threat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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