Go read about the test elsewhere (“Fundamentally changes the landscape” is a good one as well as Washington Post’s just-the-facts coverage), but I just have one thing to say that I’m sure the news reports won’t focus on:
Both were long weekends, both incidents required top US leaders to wake up in the middle of the night.
Exploding an in-your-face nuclear bomb just isn’t enough for Kim Jong Il, he’s so evil he won’t even wait till the US has had its morning coffee! Well, I’m sure the government pays overtime for whatever non-exempt employees have to respond.
Update: One country’s interrupted holiday is another’s celebrated holidays:
UPDATE 7: Why today, you might ask? Well, Korean-language Money Today suggests that because today—Oct. 9—falls between two holidays in Korea: the anniversary of Kim Jong-il assuming the position of Korean Workers Party general secretary ( Oct. 8 ) and the anniversary of the founding of the Korean Workers Party ( Oct. 10 ).
I don’t think it has anything to do with long weekends, but surely it’s not a coincidence that NK’s tests happen on holidays related to the creation of the United States. I’m always taken aback by Kim Jong Il’s rantings about how he needs nuclear arms to “protect” NK from the US … meanwhile the only reason that most of the US even cares about NK at all is that we don’t want them to have nuclear weapons. Ironically enough if they were “only” abusing the civil rights of their citizens, they probably wouldn’t be as much of a target for scrutiny and criticism.
Not to mention that Abe was in South Korea when the tests were carried out. What a message. It’s like Kim’s looking across the border, saying, “Let me decide your agenda for you.”
And now that they have “Nuclear Test Day”, NK can declare this their version of “Golden Week”…. though where anyone’s gonna go or what they might buy remains a mystery.
I wonder how much of the ‘landscape’ this really does change. North Korea has had a deterrent capability for decades now. Kim can just say the word and hundreds of thousands of South Koreans would be toast through conventional artillery fire. So what is he going to do with a nuke that he can’t put on a missile? A suitcase bomb in Tokyo? Japan (in conjunction with the U.S. – even if we don’t consider the nuclear umbrella factor) has the firepower to make that a disaster for his regime. And of course, there is no guarantee that the few delivery options he has will work. Symbolically, a nuke is a nuke, of course, and NK can now claim to be playing with the big boys, but I don’t see how strategically this is in NK’s interests.
I’m really interested in how Abe will pitch this to the Japanese public, in particular, whether he will draw on public hysteria to push forward his constitutional revision agenda. You guys on the ground in Japan, how is this playing over there?
A bomb that won’t fit on a missile is hardly going to fit in a suitcase.
I haven’t yet heard anyone actually mention the NK nuke thing over here, but since I don’t own a TV anyone with internet access is as well equipped to check the media reaction as I am. I’m sure next week’s weekly magazines will have a lot of great reactionary articles though, so I’ll try and pick up something nice and right-wing.
It was the day Ban Ki-moon was formally nominated as UN SG. Probably more important than any of the other dates. Same type of steal-your-thunder-SK-event happened over the summer of 2002; SK has the World Cup, NK has … the Arirang Festival. Lesson; nuke tests get a little more coverage than Arirang.
“A bomb that won’t fit on a missile is hardly going to fit in a suitcase.”
Haha. Well spotted. I should have thought before typing. Now that I think about it, I actually remember reading somewhere that experts were divided over whether a nuke could get that small.
Here’s an article from a some realist from Nagoya. I hate how the English speaking world seems to be painting this as some kind of new Asian arms race.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20551897-7583,00.html
I wonder how she feels now that Abe has made his “no nukes” statement.