NCAAbbs

How should the world community respond? I am not asking for you to talk about Bush or what should have BEEN done. I am asking what should be done now. If you want to blame Bush (or Clinton) start your own thread.

This is huge. Now what?

Now what? We live with a nuclear North Korea, what else?

I'm not sure that there was ever a realistic chance of preventing it diplomatically... but putting NK in the "Axis of Evil" speech and then showing them what happens to such people by invading fellow axis member Iraq sure didn't help.

Only good thing I see is that NK running a nuke test flies right into the face of everything that China has tried to do on that front. Making the Chinese lose huge face very publicly will cost them. Of course, the biggest problem with allowing China to run point on NK is that China's interests are not necessarily the USA's best interests.

You can bet that Iran is watching carefully and understands the implications.

From what I've read this morning, the Chinese officials are pretty pissed off about it, even though NK did give them a 30-minute warning the detonation was coming. I imagine this is the best bet the UN now has to pass some major sanctions against North Korea, because China will be more likely to agree to them right now.

As far as long-term effects, I imagine it has destroyed any and all chances of a North-South reunification, and will likely make the incident that happened over the weekend (South Korean troops firing at North Koreans who were in the DMZ) far more common. I imagine troops on both sides of the DMZ will be more trigger happy in the coming months.

This is going to really make East Asia a true madhouse. Japan is actually considering a serious round of rearmament. China is upset and embarassed. South Korea is very nervous and their representative is about to become the UN Secretary - General. I am guessing that Iran and Syria are rubbing their hands together very gleefully. Reuniting North and South Korea is now is going to be unlikely. The UN is talking about sanctioning North Korea, one of the poorest, most politically isolated country in the world. I have no idea how this mess will fall out. I agree with GN on this: live fire incidents are going to increase. I hope that the NK and SK troops can keep level heads and not go back into a full - on shooting war.

I'd bet my back teeth that the Japanese nuclear industry has at this very moment detailed plans for building nuclear weapons. Given the excellence of their production skills and the advanced state of their nuclear engineering the Japanese could probably build a working device within three months of greenlighting one. They already have access to weapons grade uranium.

The SK's are going to be more reserved about it I think since they are within spitting distance of the NK's.

One hundred years ago the terrible weapon every nation wanted was the battleship. Every nation with a navy started building the biggest, fastest and most heavily armed battleships they could build. In the 20s the US hosted the Washington Naval Conferences that decided how many battleships each nation would be allowed to build. The ratios heavily favored the Anglo-European nations (that included the USA) and cut back on the rest of the world. This was supposed to ensure world peace by limiting the force nations could possess. (It didn't see any point to limit Japans building of aircraft carriers.) WWII happened anyway and battleships passed into history as a result of the conflict and chahges it brought about.
Now we are trying to do the same thing with nuclear weapons like we have the power to dictate such matters to the rest of the world like we did in the 20s. The nuclear "genie" is out of the bottle and no amount of sanctions by the "Big Boys" is going to control access to it or limit its allure to the smaller nations that see N-weapons as "The Great Equalizer", like the six-shooter of the old west. North Korea and Iran are not the last nations to go after "The Bomb". What scares hell out of a lot of folks is the religious fanatic who believes he will go to heaven with a corps of virgins for blowing himself up with TNT. Imagine what he might think his reward would be if he did it with a nuclear weapon?