Little comfort in doubting North Korea

Western experts don’t believe North Korea’s claim this week that it detonated a hydrogen bomb— what the Hermit Kingdom called “an H- bomb of justice.”

According to a New York Times headline, “U. S. and South Korea doubt North Korean Hydrogen Bomb.” On CNN. com: “North Korea claims to test hydrogen bomb; U. S. not so sure.” On The Denver Post’s website: “North Korea says it tested H- bomb to widespread skepticism.”

As The Times put it, “The seismological data from the test was more in keeping with a simpler uranium- or plutoniumbased atomic device.”

But is there any comfort in what the experts are saying? I don’t think so.

Here’s the problem: If it wasn’t a hydrogen bomb that North Korea set off, it was still nuclear. If it didn’t even pack the punch of the atomic bombs we dropped over Japan in World War II ( experts estimate the equivalence of 6 kilotons of TNT in the North Korean device, versus 15 in Hiroshima), it’s still enough explosive energy to do us a lot of harm. Hardly cause to take comfort.

And here’s how they might most likely do us harm. Not by sending a warhead toward our mainland. We have good reason to believe that North Korea is prioritizing the production of long- range missiles, but our experts don’t believe they have the technical ability yet to create a warhead that could withstand the heat of launch and the speed of transit.

Mind you, the experts could be wrong. But a political analysis would conclude that while North Korea’s leadership is ditzy, it’s not suicidal. We leave that for the radical Muslim terror groups.

And even assuming the experts are correct, warheads delivered by missiles aren’t the only way North Korea can try to hurt us. Intelligence sources, while they don’t want to alarm the American people, say they’re more worried in the near future about something coming out of North Korea far more portable and far more likely: a so- called “dirty bomb,” or something similar whose name tells the whole story, a “suitcase bomb.”

Suffice to say, terrorists are in touch with North Korea, which intelligence analysts believe might be putting weapons like these, or at least their technology, in the terrorists’ hands. Think of the possibilities. You can bet the bad guys are thinking about them every day of the week.

So it’s all about context. North Korea exploded something that registered seismically on the Richter Scale. Uranium, plutonium, hydrogen, “just” nuclear, it doesn’t matter.

I hope the United States is not putting all its eggs in one basket, on the wrong side of the world.