Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? NO, It’s an intercontinental ballistic missile!

North Korea is doing new missile tests with rockets that are believed to have enough range to hit anywhere on the globe. They might not be as accurate as western counterparts, but if they ever launch a nuclear strike, it won’t matter much, if they miss by a few kilometers. World is upset, we’re getting emergency Security Council meetings and Japan is pretty nervous.
What’s the main difference between North Korea having nuclear weapons and USA having nuclear weapons? USA is a bigger global terrorist than North Korea ever has the potential to be, true. Main difference, however, is that you can trust the US president to play by the rules. He has to get reelected and if your people are vaporized by other nukes if you start shooting your nukes, then those people cannot reelect you. Nuclear weapons and mutual assured destruction is essentially a good thing in modern world, where we all play by the rules and we all know we will all die if we break those rules.
There’s a difference, though, when new players enter the field and they have no intention of playing by the rules. They don’t care about their own population, and they have a pretty good nuclear bunker for themselves. In such a scenario, there’s trouble.
It is ironic that the same weapon that can keep the world safe is suddenly causing so much trouble in world politics. Something that was in the domain of the big guys to set the rules with is now becoming available to the little guy, like Iran or North Korea. Sure, they might not have working nukes and delivery systems yet, but they’re getting there. When the nuke monopoly is broken we will cease to have any effective form of world government, which we now, on some basic level, have. Any chance we could get the new WTO treaty signed before the little guys get really pissed off by the continued opression?