North Korea’s nuclear challenge

What happened

North Korea this week brushed off warnings it would face stronger international sanctions and tested a long-range missile with the potential for delivering a nuclear warhead to Alaska and Hawaii. The test came just hours before President Obama gave a major speech in Prague calling for a new framework to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons from the planet. North Korea’s three-stage rocket was launched with much fanfare, including a personal appearance by Kim Jong Il, and the government claimed it boosted a satellite into orbit, where it was said to be playing patriotic North Korean music. But Western military sources said the missile fizzled, and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Nonetheless, missile experts warned that North Korea was now a step closer to developing a long-range missile that could be fitted with a nuclear warhead.

Obama said in Prague that nuclear nations must reduce and secure their arsenals, in order to prevent rogue states and terrorists from acquiring bombs. He also vowed to negotiate a strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia that would significantly reduce the number of nuclear warheads. “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act,” he said. As for North Korea, Obama declared that Pyongyang “must know that the path to security and respect will never come through threats and illegal weapons.”

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What the editorials said

“Rarely has a presidential speech been so immediately and transparently divorced from reality,” said The Wall Street Journal. As North Korea’s missile launch made plain, decades of treaties have failed to stop bad actors from pursuing nukes. Obama thinks that if the U.S. simply gives up its own weapons, it will have the “moral authority” to persuade others to do so. But the “most conspicuous anti-proliferation victories in recent decades” were Israel’s strike against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear plant and America’s removal of Saddam altogether.

The threat from North Korea’s failed rocket pales in comparison to the danger of listening to American hawks, said The Boston Globe. Conservatives are demanding that Obama attack North Korea or try to destabilize Kim’s government. “That would only create a security threat where none now exists.” If provoked, North Korea could restart its nuclear program, which would be real trouble.

What the columnists said

The best thing Obama can do with the despotic North Korean leader is ignore him, said Fred Kaplan in Slate.com. “Every time the larger powers bellow about the North Korean threat” they merely lavish on Kim “the attention that he needs both to negotiate for goodies diplomatically and to justify his totalitarian reign at home.” When Kim gets desperate enough, he’ll return to the negotiating table. But “we have a lot more important things on our plate than North Korea’s puny bomb and flaccid missiles.”

The biggest threat to our national security is our naïve president, said William Kristol in The Washington Post. In his Prague speech, Obama put the U.S. on a “trajectory” toward “a world without nuclear weapons.” That only makes sense if the world miraculously turned into a place “without war or without threats of war.” Good luck with that. “The danger is that the allure of a world without nuclear weapons can be a distraction—even an excuse for not acting against real nuclear threats.”

A more immediate risk, said Michael Tomasky in the London Guardian, is the notion that the world’s problems can be solved by Obama’s personal charm. But North Korea and Iran are not “going to wake up one day and say to themselves: By golly, this Obama fellow is the most popular president in maybe all of history, we’d better do what he says.” A safer world will be built not on stirring rhetoric but on “long and difficult work and diplomacy.”

What next?

Obama this week said he planned to host a “Global Summit on Nuclear Security” in Washington later this year, with the aim of establishing new international standards for securing nuclear material. “We must build on our efforts to break up black markets, detect and intercept materials in transit, and use financial tools to disrupt this dangerous trade,” Obama said. His administration is also working with the U.N. to develop a “nuclear-fuel bank,” possibly in Kazakhstan. Any nation could withdraw fuel to run energy reactors, as long as it renounced nuclear weapons.