Grim's Hall

Stanley Kurtz on North Korea in National Review Online. Kurtz is being sloppy, with a large number of qualifiers and a number of bald assertions (e.g., "Even if Yongbyon stays quiet, the North Koreans will shortly be selling nuclear fuel manufactured in their clandestine plant(s) to al Qaeda." Well--maybe. It's wise to act as though that were going to be the case, because the consequences of it happening are so severe. Still, here's a place where one of those qualifiers would have been useful). Even so he's got some things worth reading. The first is the existence of clandestine uranium processing plants, whose activities/existence can't be examined. Earlier this week I was discussing with a close friend a theory I had that they might test a weapon underground, thereby creating more fissible material on the instant as well as announcing that they were a nuclear state. She didn't think they would, not wishing to create quite -that- big a stir. Here's a reminder that they don't have to do so in order to keep producing uranium, though not as speedily as with undergound tests.