There is something comforting about North Korea’s nuclear weapons

dangerman

Untypically, Rod buries some good sense among his cheap sneers & hobnailed prejudice. In particular, it was good to see the sanctity of Israel's nuclear programme queried.

This, by the way, from a peace monkey who wants no nukes whatever, anywhere.

Aqua Fyre

Forgive my skepticism. But the likelyhood of North Korea having actually acquired the technical capacity to create, let alone detonate any sort of nuclear bomb borders on the improbable.

Despite 2 attempts, the North Koreans have succeeded only in creating a cracker.

According to the latest sources who check on the seismic measurements related to such detonations, the most likely amount of explosive involved was probably no more than 1.6 kilotons. Sounds like an awful lot until you realize that its the equivalant of just 1000 truck loads of TNT or perhaps the equivalant of 1 or even 2 thermobaric (fuel - air) weapons.

And, gee, lets think about it.. This Stalinist state knows nothing else about poker, except to how to play a pathetic set of cards for maximum bluff effect.

Mia Colpo

!!!

"...Anti-American Left-Wing International Bearded Lesbian Peace Monkeys."

Forsooth Rodney. You don't really suppose that will wind up the dopiest peacenik or, for that matter gull even the most bird-brained hawk, do you?

More importantly, you MUST desist from the Glenda Slaggish style of staring sentences with 'and'.

Conjunctions, exist to conjoin but while frequently used to deliver a sarcastic afterthought they now seem stale and stilted.

You are the Dante of this prestigious organ we look to you for the pure and profound use of our noble tongue.

James

I'm gonna see if I've got the Korean Central News Agency as a channel option on the Sky Box.

Herbert Thornton

I can't say that I feel much comforted, but I am really savouring Rod's description of The Korean Central News Agency as "Pyongyang’s equivalent of the BBC, except more balanced."

Very well put, Rod.

David Chambers

Mr. Liddle obviously knows little of the horrors caused by the use of nuclear weapons. He would do better if he were to aim his invective towards those who deal in illegal arms sales. The may include disgruntled members of the Russian, Pakistani, or any number of crazed zealots seeking their "15 minutes of fame." Those are the most likely sources of the potential for a nuclear 'accident,' one that, though apparently most difficult for Mr. Liddle to comprehend, would most certainly thoroughly educate him promptly should he have the misfortune to be traveling in the area where the event takes place.

What this article says about Mr. Liddle is that he has a personal, and as yet, unnamed animus towards an enterprise which, for over 60 years has been a voice of reason and scientific integrity; things which Mr. Liddle would do well to emulate while drafting any future pieces for general consumption. You have exposed the soft underbelly of your prejudice, Mr. Liddle, by belittling the background of those whose primary function is to remind us that the horrors of Nagasaki & Hiroshima must never, ever be repeated if we are to retain our humanity. Furthermore, your lack of journalistic integrity is there for the entire world to see when you belittle so many with so much unsupported diatribe.

Lest you believe yourself to be correct despite my response, I remind you that on March 16, 1988, Iraqi forces launched a poison gas attack on the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja, killing 5000 people. Biological weapons used so recently indicate willingness for megalomaniacal tyrants everywhere to use 'whatever means necessary' to achieve their aims. Do you really believe, Mr. Liddle, that we live in a world where a biological weapon or, for that matter, a nuclear device, could not be used again, solely due to some concept you claim? Please advise us as to whether you possess any evidence whatsoever which indicates that your multi-lateralist sympathizing views on mutually assured destruction are held by every tyrant and megalomaniac existing today. Please, don’t hold back, we really need to know!

Another thing that would reassure us that you may actually have a valid point is how you seem to believe that madmen, given the history of their achievements with regard to destruction of human life (Hitler comes to mind), have any compunctions whatsoever to address the issues they face, much less engage in the higher mental function of "unerringly compelling logic,” when it comes to the killing of other human beings?

Seriously, Mr. Liddle, your rant is nothing more than a petty, nauseatingly offensive, ludicrous and superficial take on what actually goes on at the Bulletin. With regard to who is involved in the producing the content, it appears, after my exhaustive research, that every single one of them maintains more credibility, better credentials, and a better reputation for academic and, most importantly, professionally responsible reporting of the facts as they know them, than you have done here.

So, never let it be said that journalism is about seeking the truth; in this case at least, your attempts to vent your spleen on the unsuspecting public will no doubt be met with, (dare I say it?), a yawn.

Perhaps you can do us all a favor and just report actual NEWS, and leave the scientific reporting to those who are eminently qualified to do just that.

Nigel

Vaguely comforting? Your taste for provocation is well know but here you are simply being dangerously silly.

Steve Earl

"The Korean Central News Agency, Pyongyang’s equivalent of the BBC, except more balanced{".

Sentence of the week! Possibly of the year. I laughed out loud. And of course there is usually truth in comedy.

Well done Mr Liddle!

Dwight Vandryver

The Mutually Assured Destruction concept presupposes that the would-be aggressor behaves rationally. But let us wonder what would happen if North Korea, for whatever reason, launched a nuke at South Korea or Japan. How would the international community respond? Would it take weeks of talks in the UN to decide? Should it be a proportionate response, or overkill? Would Russia and China accept the radiation fall-out? The international community would be paralysed with indecision.
For this reason, the likelihood is that secret negotiations between South Korea and Japan with the "big three" (US, China and Russia), have taken place. As yet, there is no mention of "regime change", but it could happen, especially if North Korea perfects its weaponry.
In one sense, North Korea is doing the world a service in that it brings together the "big three" by forcing them to develop a strategy for handling nuclear armed rogue states.
Although the article's an amusing read, Mr Liddle overlooks the fact that an air-burst of a 10 kiloton nuke over a densely populated city would produce a death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Daniel Lionsden

A very glib article written by someone far removed from danger. I doubt whether the South Koreans or Japanese will be viewing Kim's military machine in quite so lightly.
Although the Bulletin have been far from perfect (their inability to move the clock forward during the sainted JFK's proximity to nuclear apocalypse betrays their political bias and I guess that Obamessiah will be given the same treatment if history repeats itself) at least they take the prospect of Nuclear war seriously.

James Strong

It is OK for Israel to have the Bomb because they will not attack us.
It is not OK for Iran to have the Bomb because they might attack us, our interests or our allies.

paul gilboy

Kim Jong-il's a laugh isn't he, one minute he telling he peasants that their grass allowance is being cut as their is a food shortage and the next he telling them to pick up arms and defend the paradise they live in.
I don't think he carry out any threat of invasion because borders become fluid during a time of war.
It would not be too much of a leap to see the people army hurtling themselves towards the south with every body else, pots and pans, dogs, old women with a prized pig under her arm, running behind them.
You could easily imagine kim and his generalslistening in to their crackly radios hearing a minute by minute update...the peoples army supported by the people have captured another mc donals outlet, and another and another. The capitalist swines at KFC have been over run by our glorious soldiers. And every chinese outlet in the south has been secured. Then silence.

Mark Adrian Solomon

Israel needs to have nuclear weapons for precisely the same reason the West needed them in the Cold War - heavily outnumbered in conventional military hardware posessed by its enemies, and in Israel's case outnumbered 50 to 1 in population. Iran must never be allowed to get them because on a number of occasions they have said they will use them - the difference with the Cold War could not be starker, when both sides said they didn't want to use them.

You are right to poke fun at PC bearded leftie peaceniks whose policies would only lead to war. But Seoul, the capital of South Korea, an advanced Western democratic nation, with whom North Korea has just declared the ceasefire no longer to be relevant, is only about 30 miles from the border. A firecracker Hiroshima style nuclear weapon dropped by one of those laughable North Korean rockets - which can surely hit a city 30 miles away - would cause several hundred thousand deaths. So the starving basket case of North Korea, run by a certifiable lunatic are now pretty convincingly in the potential blackmail business.

Do you find that funny and worth sneering at Rod? I don't and I doubt the South Koreans do either.

james harries

Does all that nuclear testing use up nuclear material? so, hooray...
I'm told the Chinese regard the N Koreans as a delinquent child. They seem far more like the IRA prisoners on the dirty protest to me.

Lawrence in Cheshire

From my research I don't think Manchester United have ever played Blyth Spartans in the FA cup and probably never will. Also their manager Mick Tait (Yosser) doesn't bear too much similarity to Kim Jong il.
But apart from that the analogy is spot on and the article did make me laugh out loud that I drew strange looks from the French people next to me.

neil

qoute...The Korean Central News Agency — Pyongyang’s equivalent of the BBC, except more balanced r

brilliant satire on theBBC

Cutters

Good that you drew light on Israel as I find it strange that it has no sanctions on it for breaking international laws, but North Korea... Bad people, communists dont cha know.

Conker Burnish

For what it's worth here in Korea the news has been dominated by the suicide and funeral of ex-President Noh. Nobody at work seems to believe that we are teetering on the edge of nuclear exchange.

David Short

David Chambers comments: 'Mr. Liddle obviously knows little of the horrors caused by the use of nuclear weapons'

I'm not sure what DC means here by 'the horrors', or how he knows that RL knows little about them.

Nuclear weapons kill multitudes of people, vaporising most of them instantly.

Now that's a much kinder death than that caused by most modern weapons. Even the humble military bullet has been so super-designed that it will never enter and exit your body cleanly, but will search for something visceral first, then the air pressure difference will create a huge, fatal (but not necessarily instantly fatal) exit wound.

I know what death I prefer.

Gil

Heh...nice to see the odd (!) Israel hater here trying to desperately spin away from the North Korea issue. Probably supporters of the mullahs of Iran, in whose name North Korea carried out the test.

A. MacAulay

To David Chambers, morality is one category with which to judge a situation. It was "immoral" to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki; of course it was. At the same time (really) my father was a POW in a Japanese concentration camp and he told me that without the bombs and the collapse of the Japanese he and the remanant left from Singapore would never have survived, indeed would probaly have been murdered. Therefore, I directly thank my existance to "the horrors of Nagasaki & Hiroshima". Of course the answer to the moral question as to whether I am worth a middle sized, industrial city and its inhabitants is no. But the question is nonsense because it is a question without context, aside from the probably millions of other humans who owe their lives to the same events, just as your, perhaps morally upright Bulletin is ahistorical and therefore unscientific. I would suggest that Rod Liddle's polemic is very useful in revealing the direction in which to look for the "truth". The organisation you defend went from being a collection of (rightly) concerned scientists to being a self-maintaining pressure group.

Further, a societies capacity to produce something so complex a nuclear bomb is a reflection of the technical culture of that society. It also requires a stable administration capable of correcting itself, something a democracy can, but a plan-economy oligarchy like the Soviet Union cannot. In other words, that can plan, budget and create stable alliances. There are no Islamic countries, and certainly not a Stalinist mad house like N. Korea, that can fulfill any of these requirements. It seems most likely that our friend and ally Pakistan stole the technology to build nuclear weapons and has shared this with other now nuclear threshold countries. With friends like that...............

geordie ex pat

Have you seen Blyth Spartans play recently.

Valerio

Anti-American Left-Wing International Bearded Lesbian Peace Monkeys.

Well said Mr Liddle!

rod liddle

Geordie - I haven't see them, but I do keep an eye out for their results.

David Chambers - was your letter satire? It's hard to tell these days.

In general, though, I accept the "glib" charge and apologise if that's how the piece seemed. But I think we vastly overestimate, to our own cost, the threat of singularities like North korea (or Iraq). There is a whole other piece to be done about obsession with "weapons of mass destruction" - which, nukes aside, are actually weapons of very little dustruction at all.

The Masked Marvel

I've got a tenner that says that every single heavy breather here with twisted knickers over what the Speccie's court jester said about NorK nukes thinks that Iran should be allowed to have them as well because the Joooooos do.

Not much genuine concern about the actual dangers, if we're honest.

Sam Green

Surprising that Rod doesn't take into account Iran's religious incentive to destroy Israel even it it means their own destruction. The Iranian nuke program is based upon the same underlying premise as the Palestinian suicide bomber, but simply a number of orders higher, and thus, far more worrying - "we love death," as the Hamas Spokesperson Kaled Mashal likes to say, "more than the Jews love life." Radical interpretations of Islam have brought the muslim world to the point where they are willing to commit suicide in their quest to cause the West, and Israel in particular, harm. This is due to a number of complex historical reasons, but basically boils down to resentment at the fact that Israel and the West's power is at odds with their religious belief that says Islam will dominate and re-establish a global Islamic state with all nations under their rule. The 'suicide bomber'paradigm is the only practical method for technologically backward Islamic states to strike fear among a militarily superior infidel. We must remember, that in the 50's, 60's and 70's Arab states did their best to try to defeat Israel in the military field, but eventually gave up after suffering multiple defeats, and as Israel's home-grown defence industry advanced technologically, the Arab states were left far behind by the late 80's. They then tried the suicide bomber method beginning in the early 90's, and their use of civilians as shields in the recent Israel vs Hamas and Hezbollah wars (which is actually the same methodology)has proven to be more successful than tanks. The combination of an Islamic inferiority complex with a nuke weapon is extremely dangerous - and is way beyond the conventional theories of nuclear detterence based on the US/USSR model. Wake up Rod. Don't you already know this???

David Chambers

Just in case you failed to comprehend my point, Mr. Liddle, here is supporting evidence that the Bulletin is not, as you print for all the world to see, a bunch of "anti-American left-wing international bearded lesbian peace monkeys, etc."

Some members of the Science and Advisory Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which oversees the Bulletin and it's activities:

Robert Socolow

Socolow is the codirector of Princeton University's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, under which he has helped launch new, coordinated research in environmental science, energy technology, geological engineering, and public policy. His research interests include global carbon management, the hydrogen economy, and fossil-carbon sequestration. He is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Alexander Glaser, Ph.D. degree in Physics, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, April 2005.
A member of the research staff at Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security, Glaser also serves as associate editor of the program's eponymous journal. His research interests include nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear energy, and nuclear forensics. In addition, he is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Material. As such, he has coedited many of the panel's reports.

Prof. James Hansen, Ph.D. (Physics), University of Iowa, 1967.
Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He is also a professor of earth and environmental studies at Columbia University. His current research areas include radiative transfer in planetary atmospheres, modeling current climate trends, and projecting humans' potential impact on climate. He publishes prolifically and has won many awards, including the 2007 Leo Szilard Lectureship Award from the American Physical Society.

Edward W. 'Rocky' Kolb
Rocky is the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics and the College and Chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, as well as a member of the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics.

Lawrence J. Korb (Vice-Chair), was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award in Political Science. Since earning his Ph.D., Dr. Korb has worked in various teaching and professional capacities including serving as the Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1981 through 1985. Dr. Korb is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Senior Advisor at the Center of Defense Information. Dr. Korb has authored twenty books as well as over 100 articles on national security issues.

Lawrence Krauss

Krauss is the inaugural director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University and foundation professor at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department. In addition to writing the best-seller, The Physics of Star Trek, Krauss has written six other books, including Fear of Physics and the science epic Atom: An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth…and Beyond. He also frequently writes commentary for New Scientist magazine.

Leon Lederman

An internationally renowned high-energy physicist, Lederman is director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, and holds an appointment as the Pritzker Professor of Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Among his many honors are the Nobel Prize in Physics, the National Medal of Science, and the Enrico Fermi Prize awarded by President Bill Clinton.

Pavel Podvig

A research associate at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, Podvig spent his early career at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He was the principal investigator on the Russian Nuclear Weapons Databook project and has extensively published and presented on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Russian strategic forces, and the U.S.-Russian disarmament process.

M. V. Ramana

A physicist, Ramana is senior fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development in Bangalore, India. His expertise is in the Indian nuclear weapons and energy programs, disarmament, and the storage and disposition of nuclear materials. A member of the International Panel on Fissile Material, he is currently examining the economic viability and environmental impacts of the Indian nuclear power program.

Thomas Rosenbaum

An expert on the quantum mechanical nature of materials, Rosenbaum is provost of the University of Chicago. He has been the university's James Franck Professor of Physics and the vice president of Argonne National Laboratory. His honors include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the William McMillan Award for Outstanding Contributions to Condensed Matter Physics.

Stephen Schneider

The Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford University, Schneider has contributed to all four Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports. Currently, he is coordinating lead author of the IPCC's Working Group II Chapter 19, "Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risk from Climate Change." PDF He is the founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Climatic Change.

Perhaps a bit more education would do your column, as well as your readers, some good, if only because they wouldn't be getting your narrow, fear-mongering Republican viewpoint on whatever it is that you choose to rant about next time. What currency DO your editors pay you in? LUPINS?

Alastair Browne

We must remember that even if North Korea does use their atomic bomb on anyone, they will suffer the wrath of not one but three powers. They could unite the U.S., Russia, and China like nobody's business!