What a great victory for Bush! Years of unfettered nuke development. Ah, yeah, that's the ticket!

Here's a question that I'm sure is one a lot of people are asking/have thought about: was this a success for a good cop/bad cop approach? Or was it really Chris Hill being allowed to do the (what I think is) smart thing and pursue hard-nosed diplomacy?

Friday SCATblogging — a forewarned grizzly attack.

Scat when you see fresh grizzly scat — if you notice it.

With the "good cop/bad cop" approach, as you suggest, North Korea tested a nuclear device. How could this approach be seen as a success? It was a foreign policy disaster! I suggest that we simply dodged a bullet in Nov 2006, and cooler heads took over the process afterwards.

Played out an alternate scenario with my students.

Kim learns, the hard way, that nuclear weapons production is tricky. His program is a bust. He's feeing the beast with scare funds and the regular army is getting restive, since it's used to being fed first.

The only thing he's got going for him is fear and leverage.

So he "agrees" to do in the program in exchange for a basket of concessions, appearing statesman-like and saving face while leaving open the redirection of scarce resources to other, more reliable forms of military power.

Crazy? Or is he that sophisticated?

I saw some coprolite once and I was petrified Thers!

I mean i was petrified, Socratic

[dunno why I put Thers theres. So? Impeach me.]

President Obama will have to do some sort of trade for the remaining N. Korean nukes. The trade will cost the U.S. taxpayer a bundle, and will also cost Obama politically because the GOP will turn it into one of their asinine talking points about "unconditionally negotiating" or something, even though it's simply Obama cleaning up one of Dubya's messes. Just another piece of the huge bill the country will have to pay for having allowed the Bush gang to steal the presidency in 2000.

ProfBurgos,
Exactly what I was thinking.

The watertower was blown up only after they moved into their new underground facilities. This ain't momentous.

"Largely irreversible"? Didn't the New York Times story say that it was cosmetic, that the tower was not a significant part of the program, that it could be easily replaced, and that the key parts of the facilities were "disabled" but not "destroyed"?

Kevin Drum >"...obviously even a poorly-designed nuclear bomb isn't something you want going off in your backyard, but a low-yielding nuke too heavy to deliver via ICBM isn't really all that great a deterrent...."

I`ve never been really convinced that is actually what they were attempting. It is possible that the missle firing etc was all a misdirection (Asian history is full of these types of moves) and they really wanted to develop a very small device that would be (almost) impossible to detect & they succeeded. This scenario could fit nicely with what we know (at least what is in the public record) of their other behaviors re Pakistan etc.

I hope I`m wrong.

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so.” - Mark Twain

Of course, we don't know if Kim's decision was affected by the fact he now has a nuclear arsenal.

Undoubtedly. Kim got an agreement to terminate a program that had no significant utility other than as a bargaining chip. Moreover, he got an agreement without having to reveal much about what he still has. That leaves him with a lot to bargain with, even if it's only uncertainty about what he still has. There's a lot more work, a lot more negotiating, and a lot more aggravation, in store for the next administration.

I agree with troglodyte - the good cop/bad cop approach was a disaster. I was wondering if this would be the conservative justification for their irresponsible behavior.

The problem is not good/bad cops.
The problem is squabbling/incompetent cops.

This is really amusing - North Korea will now have a perfect record off snookering every US President since Nixon. They probably outfoxed him and others too, but I just wasn't paying attention.

captcrisis -- Yes, "irreversible" is probably a bit strong. However, the key words are "in a matter of days". Unlike in 2003, it would require more time and visible activity before they could restart plutonium production.

Which of course may be irrelevant if they feel they already have enough material to serve their purposes (estimates 35-50Kg plutonium or 5-10 nukes), which I'd guess is the case, otherwise they would have delayed further.

I dunno. Hasn't David Blaine been working on that hunger thing? was that a prep for moving to N Korea and disappearing that water tower? Prove me wrong!

optical weenie is on to something. We should be terrified that North Korea has leapfrogged us in nuclear technology, inventing a way to reprocess plutonium without dumping waste heat into the atmosphere!

Grumpy: We should be terrified that North Korea has leapfrogged us in nuclear technology, inventing a way to reprocess plutonium without dumping waste heat into the atmosphere!

You don't need large waste heat disposal facilities to reprocess plutonium.

p.s. For more info on reprocessing see here.

North Korea doesn't have to put a missile on an ICBM to have a deterrent.

You can just about fling a nuclear weapon across the DMZ and into downtown Seoul with a catapault. There's US bases with thousands of soldiers there too. In some ways, their nukes are redundant, because they can achieve pretty much the same effect by firing artillery shells laden with VX or some other chemical weapon into Seoul.

Not to mention that an ICBM can be used to carry a light warhead across the globe or (within certain limits) a heavy one a short distance.

The cooling tower is a nice touch. However, the thing was 60 feet tall and dwarfed by some of the trees behind it. If I was Rice I would have negotiated a ban on those camera angles.

I'd have to say that if NK doesn't give up their plutonium, existing bombs, up to date schematics of the the current bombs (and the "dud" bomb), and a record of their foreign nuclear correspondence -- they really haven't given up anything. The reactor has already served its purpose. But maybe I just have bush derangement syndrome.