Practicalmadness

Let’s see: a mysterious explosion occurs on North Korea’s most important national holiday, Sept. 9 (which was the day the North Korean Communist state was founded), involving a giant crater and ‘a peculiar cloud.’ Yet neither the South Korean nor U.S. governments believe that North Korea has conducted a nuclear test.

President Bush and his top advisers have received intelligence reports in recent days describing a confusing series of actions by North Korea that some experts believe could indicate the country is preparing to conduct its first test explosion of a nuclear weapon, according to senior officials with access to the intelligence.

While the indications were viewed as serious enough to warrant a warning to the White House, American intelligence agencies appear divided about the significance of the new North Korean actions, much as they were about the evidence concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons stockpiles.

Some analysts in agencies that were the most cautious about the Iraq findings have cautioned that they do not believe the activity detected in North Korea in the past three weeks is necessarily the harbinger of a test. A senior scientist who assesses nuclear intelligence says the new evidence “is not conclusive,” but is potentially worrisome.

Some reports are now attributing the explosion to “a dam-building project or some similar public work,” and despite the American media’s current fascination with spending hundreds of hours covering stories of no importance, I’d like to think that had North Korea tested a nuclear weapon for real the fearmongers in our government would be right there with the anti-Stalinist agitprop.

But the idea that it’s even possible that a so-called “rogue state” with very public aspirations toward acquiring or developing WMDs could test a nuke, or even look like they might be testing one, without the US government going very publicly apeshit is extremely disconcerting.

(Via Boing Boing.)