Great…

From The New York Times:

North Korea said Sunday night that it had set off its first nuclear test, becoming the eighth country in history, and arguably the most unstable and most dangerous, to proclaim that it has joined the club of nuclear weapons states.

One of the better articles on the implications of this watershed event comes from, as usual, The Economist.  It’s a little dated (from 2003) but still relevant.  You can find the whole article here (along with the origin of the picture to the right), but this is a nice excerpt:

It is hard to exaggerate the danger in North Korea’s finger-on-trigger taunts to America and the world that it already has a few nuclear bombs, is busily producing the stuff to build more, and will make use of them in whatever ways it chooses. Such nuclear swagger from one of the world’s reckless squad jeopardises peace on the Korean peninsula. It also endangers stability in East Asia, where threats hurled at the neighbours risk setting off an arms race and a chain reaction that could tempt several countries, including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, to turn nuclear at speed.

In my humble opinion, the biggest problem with North Korea getting the bomb is not the direct threat is poses (which isn’t completely insignificant mind you) but the destabilizing factor it brings to the east asian theater.  You better bet that this is going to have a significant affect on the thinking of several non-nuclear states in the region; the most significant of which is Japan.  The whole thing gets messy if Japan feels like revising its constitution to allow offensive military forces.  Then throw in the ticking time-bomb that is Taiwanese-Chinese relations and, well, you have a mess that could get a lot of people hurt.

Any way you cut it, this is bad news.  But it’s news we’ve seen coming for years.  And it’s news that we’ve done little to prevent for years.  Now I can’t definitively say that if Al Gore or John Kerry were President North Korea would not have the bomb, that would be a very unreasonable assertion to make.  It is very reasonable to assert, however, that the myopic focus of the Bush administration on Iraq has led them to devote less attention to Korea than the situation deserves.  And there is no doubt that the commitment of significant military and monetary resources to Iraq has diminished our ability to credibly threaten or, if need be, engage other states.  Bottom line, this event is a startling reminder of how the irrational foreign policy choices of the Bush administration have made us dangerously impotent.