North Korea Is Evil

Its citizens starve to death, it has a totalitarian society that is even worse than the one envisioned in the novel 1984, and the crazed dictator threatens war and has nuclear weapons.

North Korea threatens military strike on South

SEOUL -- North Korea, facing international censure for this week's nuclear test, threatened on Wednesday to attack the South after it joined a U.S.-led plan to check vessels suspected of carrying equipment for weapons of mass destruction.

In Moscow, news agencies quoted an official as saying that Russia is taking precautionary security measures because it fears mounting tensions over the test could escalate to war.

Adding to mounting tension in the region, South Korean media reported that Pyongyang had restarted a plant that makes plutonium that can be used in nuclear bombs.

(...)

"Any hostile act against our peaceful vessels including search and seizure will be considered an unpardonable infringement on our sovereignty and we will immediately respond with a powerful military strike," a North Korean army spokesman was quoted as saying by the official KCNA news agency.

Is North Korea crazy enough to start a war? I think they are. Since there is nothing anybody can do about it, I will simply stick my head in the sand and hope the problem goes away. If anybody has a better idea, step right up.

World War III Watch

I'm no more, nor less paranoid than the next guy, but this worries the hell out of me:

Iran Test-Fires a New Missile With a 1,200-Mile Range

American officials and international inspectors are concerned that Iran seems to have made significant progress in the three technonologies necessary to field an effective nuclear weapon: enriching uranium to weapons grade;developing a missile capable of reaching Israel and parts of Western Europe; and designing a warhead that will fit on the missile.

The greatest mystery surrounds the warhead program, which intelligence agencies said in late 2007 had been halted at the end of 2003. Asked today whether he had seen additional evidence to indicate that the weaponization program had restarted, Mr. Saymore declined to comment.

The announcement was likely to reinforce Israeli concerns, voiced strongly by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, about Iran’s regional intentions as a military and political power. The reported launch also followed efforts by the Obama administration to seek a new relationship with Tehran to forestall a nuclear program that Western countries say is designed to build a nuclear bomb. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has threatened to wipe Israel off the map. The Israelis don't take such threats lightly. In 1981 they launched a surprise aerial bombing attack and destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, for fear that Saddam was enriching uranium for weapons to be used against them. You have to think they would be willing to do the same thing to Iran. What happens if they do make a strike? What if Iran strikes back? What will the US do, if so? There are so many horrible scenarios one can think of, in a region not known for cool heads.

Thunderball

Declassified documents from 1968 reveal that a US B52 crashed on the ice off Greenland complete with four nuclear weapons. Only three were ever recovered. Story Here

The high explosives surrounding the four nuclear weapons had detonated but without setting off the actual nuclear devices, which had not been armed by the crew.

....

The documents make clear that within weeks of the incident,
investigators piecing together the fragments realised that only three of the weapons could be accounted for.

Ian Fleming's Thunderballimmediately comes to mind. SPECTRE stage a crash of a British nuclear bomber off the coast of the Bahamas. They then dive and recover the nukes. It's my favorite Bond novel and a so-so film. However, there was one part of the novel that gave me a chill. (This story proves that there was something to it.)

Bond is accessing the situation with M:

'Would that [the crash landing] explode the bombs?'

'No they are absolutely safe until they're armed. Apparantly even a direct drop, like the one from the B-47 over North Carolina in 1958, would only explode the TNT trigger to the thing. Not the plutonium.'

Yikes.