Nuclear Issues

"...[I]t's unclear who — if anyone — would buy North Korean nuclear technology. However, the nightmare scenario of North Korea selling it to the highest bidder merits consideration."

"China does not want a nuclear or belligerent North Korea, but it is even more concerned about a failed state collapsing on its border. China has tried to persuade Kim's regime to follow its market-oriented example, but Kim is afraid that an economic opening would lead to a political opening and loss of dictatorial control. So, while China is trying to moderate the current crisis, its influence is limited."

"EVEN as Russia and Georgia continue their on-again, off-again struggle over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a frenzied tea-leaf reading about the war's global political ramifications has broken out across airwaves and think-tank forums. But as the situation on the ground recedes inevitably to some new form of the pernicious "frozen conflict" that has plagued the region since Georgia's civil wars of the early 1990s, few are paying attention to a less portentous but equally critical international threat: an increase in the longstanding, rampant criminality in the conflict zones that is likely to further destabilize the entire Caucasus region and at worst provide terrorist groups with the nuclear material they have long craved."

"In addition to highlighting the dangers of this action, making nuclear transfer a crime against humanity would greatly expand opportunities for prosecution, denying national governments the ability to shelter these criminals."

Bush Administration's North Korea policy is a failure.

Sixty years ago, the Americans ended World War II by dropping Little Boy and Fat Man from B-29 bombers onto Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was the explosive climax to the military's most expensive weapons program — the Manhattan Project to design and build a nuclear bomb.

After Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush's foremost policy challenge is posed by rogue states, that is, states that threaten the United States and world peace.

In his opening statement releasing the 9/11 commission's report, chairman Thomas Kean highlighted the sobering fact that all experts expect a terrorist attack of greater proportions. He noted specifically that al-Qaeda aspires to attack us "with the use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons".