Did the World Dodge a Bullet?

Back when he was just coining the phrase, the Prez assigned three countries to the Axis of Evil. It was all very frightening at the time, and the Prez and his boys did what they could to convince us that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was our most immediate threat. Now that we've found Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, no ongoing nuclear program, and no real tie to al Queda, perhaps we put our energy in the wrong place.

The Bushies have refused to engage North Korea at all. They ridiculed the Clinton administration policy toward North Korea (which would be the one that successfully persuaded the North Koreans to stop or at least slow its pursuit of nukes) in favor of their own program to petulantly ignore North Korea unless it promised not to go after nukes. Anyone who's spent any time at all with little children will know that paying them no attention until they do what you want seldom produces that desired behavior. Talking to other parties, whether on an individual level or on the world diplomatic stage, does not mean they have to be your best friend. If you don't engage your enemies at the discussion table, there's a good chance that you'll meet them in the battlefield.

After an initial flurry of concern about the test, reports started to trickle in questioning what actually happened. I first saw an update to this post by AJ, AMERICAblog's intelligence and defense writer, which linked to a post at Arms Control Wonk.com questioning the power of the blast. This appears to have the power of a kiloton or less, which is far lower than an expected nuclear test would be. Kevin Drum added to the discussion with a Yale geology professor discussing the size of the seismic incident in comparison to the size of the explosion. Josh Marshall then quoted Jane's Defence Weekly, which explained the possibility that the test could have failed. The speculation went mainstream with a story in tomorrow's New York Times:

The North Korean test appears to have been a nuclear detonation but was fairly small by traditional standards, and possibly a failure or a partial success, federal and private analysts said yesterday.

So it seems that this smoking gun may well not be a mushroom cloud, but it could've been, and that fact reveals a complete failure by the Bush administration. The Bushies are getting ready to politicize this and start spreading fear through the electorate again. Why should we believe Bush and the Republican party can protect us from nuclear proliferation when this happened not just on their watch, but due to their negligence. How much will we allow them to put national security at risk before we finally put a stop to it?