THE COMMANDER in chief insists his North Korea policy isn't a disaster.
At a news conference Friday, President Bush was asked why, given North Korea's increasing nuclear capability, its refusal to talk and its July 4 missile launches, Americans shouldn't conclude that the U.S. policy toward North Korea is a failed one.
"Because it takes time to get things done," Bush replied.
Unfortunately, time is only likely to expose even more starkly that his North Korea policy is a striking failure.
Taking a page from its post-9/11 strategy of avoiding discussion of the inability to capture Osama bin Laden, for the last year the Bush administration has assiduously avoided two words: North Korea.
Until Kim Jong Il forced himself back into the limelight, the administration had almost succeeded in erasing him from public consciousness. The White House's desire to change the subject is understandable. Since Bush entered the Oval Office in January 2001, Kim's estimated stockpile of plutonium has quintupled.
In 2001, U.S. intelligence officials judged that in 1991, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, North Korea secretly reprocessed spent fuel diverted from its Yongbyon research reactor to produce enough plutonium to make one or two nuclear bombs. Estimates now are that Pyongyang today has enough plutonium for eight to 13 bombs' worth of plutonium and a production line that is making two additional bombs' worth of plutonium every year.
Why are Kim's nuclear bombs a much graver threat than his missiles?
As a vehicle for delivering a nuclear weapon, an intercontinental ballistic missile has one fatal flaw: It leaves an unambiguous return address. Kim knows that were he to launch a nuclear-tipped ICBM against the United States, in the same hour, America's overwhelming nuclear response would ensure that no warhead was ever again launched from North Korea.
If a North Korean nuclear weapon does detonate in an American city, it will have come in a backpack across our porous borders (where 50% more illegal aliens entered the U.S. last year than in the year before 9/11), or in one of the 7 million cargo containers that arrive by ship and rail annually (only 3% of which are inspected), or in a boat that docks at one of the countless unmonitored marinas in the Northeast, Florida or California.
