For all the anxiety about Iran’s potential to build nuclear weapons, you might think the Tehran theocracy was the only dangerous regime with nuclear aspirations.
In fact, North Korea surpasses Iran by almost every standard of militant barbarism, and yet it doesn’t merely possess nuclear aspirations. It has a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Or at least experts believe it does. At the very least it has a large and growing stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium that it has manufactured over the years. And the best estimate of the well-respected Institute for Science and International Security is that North Korea at the outset of this year may have had “approximately 6-8 nuclear weapons made out of plutonium.”
The Wall Street Journal meanwhile reported that the “latest Chinese estimates, relayed in a closed-door meeting with U.S. nuclear specialists, showed that North Korea may already have 20 warheads” — with the ability to double its arsenal by next year.
To bring it all home, Adm. William Gortney, head of U.S. Northern Command, said that North Korea has the capability to mount a warhead on a ballistic missile with a range of more than 5,000 miles — a distance that would include all of the U.S. Northwest.
This is the background for important legislation Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner proposed last week to strengthen sanctions on what he calls the “forgotten threat” of North Korea.
“The administration’s policy of strategic patience has clearly failed,” he told us. Sanctions exist, but they’re not comprehensive, he says.
“The problem with the sanctions is that the president has almost complete discretion on whether or not we impose them,” Gardner said. “Just in the past week we reaffirmed sanctions against two businesses for nuclear proliferation activities. That’s great, but we’re cherry picking who to sanction instead of saying, ‘If you have been identified by the U.S. and United Nations as someone who does business with the regime on proliferation or financial terms, you ought to be sanctioned immediately unless the president says no.’ ”
He’d turn the present process on its head.
The bill, co-sponsored by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, would also require officials involved in human rights violations be named and sanctioned by targeting their assets and travel.
It’s shocking that the most retrograde totalitarian society on Earth is steadily expanding an arsenal of mass destruction. And while sanctions aren’t a cure-all, they at least might help slow this down.
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