Overvaluing North Korea's Strength

The failure of North Korea's missile launch this weekend to enter space after apparently breaking up during its flight represents an ongoing fact about that nations nuclear capabilities: it consistently fails in efforts to demonstrate viable ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities.

Previous missile launches also failed, either exploding shortly after takeoff or breaking up in flight.

The monitoring stations that tracked its nuclear test a few years ago suggest either a lack of an explosion or a very small one that didn't work properly.

This is of course good news, because it means North Korea poses less of a threat than otherwise. But it also means that we should not take actions that damage America's interests in order to thwart North Korea's WMD ambitions.

We have consistently overvalued "doing something" about North Korea, from Bill Clinton's 1994 deal to George Bush's strenuous push in the past couple years of his presidency to negotiate a deal with the tyrannical regime.

In these deals and negotiations, North Korea has gotten fuel and maintained access to the international economy in return for its threats and tests.

And now it is Barack Obama's turn, who is also overvaluing the North Korean threat. Obama announced he wants to reduce significantly America's nuclear arsenal and prevent development of replacement or new weapons as a way to gain international support for non-proliferation efforts.

Amongst other problems, we need to build new nuclear weapons to replace an aging stockpile. Since nuclear material declines due to radioactive decay, eventually nuclear weapons need to be replaced to maintain their deterrent value.

Obama not only isn't doing anything to rejuvenate our nuclear arsenal, he is proposing to make it harder to do so.