Nuke Test Roundup

* The Japanese government has approved a total ban on trade with North Korea, and the ban has already taken effect. The BBC has a showing the last boat carrying used bicycles and refrigerators back to North Korea, to be given as rewards to loyal party members.

* Gordon Cucullu, writing at Front Page Magazine, talks about cutting China’s support to North Korea; you might want to read this first, however.

* The New York Times talks about President Bush’s threat to hold North Korea “fully accountable” for its nuclear transfers. It has a good discussion of how we would try to prevent that, and then raises some excellent questions about how credible our threat really is. For one thing, North Korea has probably already done it:

The difficulties of turning Mr. Bush’s vow into real deterrence were vividly demonstrated in late 2003, the only moment when North Korea was widely suspected of being the source of nuclear material found elsewhere in the world.

The discovery was made in Libya, which decided to give up its nuclear weapons program. Along with centrifuges and other equipment purchased from the black market network created by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear engineer, the Libyans turned over a cask of nearly two tons of uranium. It had arrived in Tripoli around 2001 in a semiprocessed form: uranium hexafluoride, the gas that is poured into centrifuges for enrichment into nuclear fuel.

Korean markings on the cask suggested that the North was the source. And chemical traces on the outside of the cask proved that the container had been at North Korea’s main nuclear site, Yongbyon.

But while the Bush administration at first charged that North Korea had been the source of Libya’s uranium, experts spent months trying to determine whether the contents of the cask had come from there as well or whether it had been filled up elsewhere. The result: plenty of suspicions, but no hard proof.

“We took months and months and months and still couldn’t come to a 100 percent conclusion,” one senior administration official said this year. “That happens. But it doesn’t help you justify a counterstrike against someone.

Horse, barn, door. The regime itself is the problem.