Media outlets and politicians around the world are scurrying around each other crying foul over North Korea detonating a nuclear device. To add insult to injury, they apparently then tested some long-range missiles. Scary stuff, eh?
Not really. The sad fact is that North Korea are by no means alone in their ability to detonate nuclear devices or launch long-range missiles. In fact, the rest of the world has been able to do this for quite some time. The image above, for example, is the US bombing of Nagaski. But they’ll have you think this was a bomb of freedom, while North Korea’s is a bomb of terror.
Indeed, here in Australia, we tested nuclear weapons for the poms for 8 years, killing many soldiers, Aboriginals and animals, gave many more horrific cancers, and poisoning our land for many millenia. The whole episode has been completely denied for decades. The official line now is “yes there were tests, but you can’t prove that this lead to your terminal illness or the death of your loved ones, so fuck off”. So while we continue to mine uranium and sell it to the highest bidder, including states such as Israel or India who refuse to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, we have absolutely no concern for what weapons our ‘allies’ will make with our uranium, no concern for the practically eternal damage to the environment caused during mining uranium, and there is no justice for Aboriginals who’s land we stole ( recently, not 200 years back ) and subjected to nuclear testing. At least North Korea had the common sense to carry out their test underground. In Australia, we tested our bombs above the desert, which is the absolute worst way to carry out such a test, because it throws up the maximum possible amount of radioactive dust into the air, carrying it thousands of kilometers around the world – even depositing some on satellites.
So why cry such crocodile tears when North Korea tests their own weapons? Sure, nuclear weapons are bad. But they’re bad, no matter who uses them. They’re not just bad when a member of the so-called Axis of Evil tests them. That’s just absurd hypocracy. No-one who talks about ‘progress in the middle east’, ‘defending Israel’, or how bombing Hiroshima and Nagaski was the right thing to do has any right lecturing North Korea ( or anyone else for that matter ) on their own military ambitions.
What should we do about North Korea then? Remove crippling trade sanctions and stop threatening them. Then practice what we preach and get rid of our nuclear weapons. Weapons proliferation, by definition, is a vicious self-reinforcing cycle. You don’t break this cycle by holding lots of weapons and then threatening smaller states. This will produce the exact opposite of our supposed goal of keeping the world safe from nuclear weapons. Of course, the wise individuals out there will point out that this goal is just BS propoganda that masks our real agenda: making sure our side is the only one with nuclear weapons.
So is North Korea really destabilising their region? Hardly. If you want to see someone destabalising things, have a look at the US and Israeli influence in the middle east. Now that is destabalising things. North Korea is just testing some weapons. Everyone does it. Who in their right mind owns weapons but doesn’t test them? But what are North Korea up to? Who knows. With a loonie like their current dictator ( it’s a dictatorship by the way, certainly not communism ), who really knows what’s driving this behaviour. Maybe they just want some trade consessions? Or some security guarantees. This is how states go about negotiating such things.