Axis of So Fucking What

October, 1962: As Huntley/Brinkley scare the nation shitless (without CGG!) about real nuclear weapons a mere 90 miles from Miami, the Kennedy administration knows two things the public doesn't, or doesn't seem to. What most people could not know (and damn sure weren't going to be told) was that the missiles were there as a direct result of our ongoing efforts to kill Castro. What they could have figured out for themselves, but don't seem to've over forty years later, is that those weapons were useless, certainly offensively. They couldn't be coordinated with a Soviet attack. Launched before a Soviet attack they were an early warning; launched later and, well, they wouldn't be: once we knew the Soviets were attacking Cuba was toast.

The possibly alleged missile of October 06 is nothing like the days of the Great Nuclear Staredown, but there's much of the same unreality in how it's been played, and in the way that unreality trumps common sense now. North Korea now threatens to develop the Bomb, as well as the rudiments of an ICBM system. To do what with, exactly? Launch at Japan in the brief moment before the northern half of the peninsula is nuked like a breakfast burrito mistakenly microwaved for fifteen minutes? How many sub-based nuclear weapons do you suppose are aimed at North Korea right this minute?

It's simple, so simple they even understand it in the Bush administration, though it seems lost on their rooting section: the only reason for a 2nd-to-5th rate military power to get the Bomb is defensive. Even uncontrollable madmen like Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, and anti-Semitic Israel eradicators like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad understand it. Since 1946, joining the nuclear club has meant, most of all, that you don't get invaded.

Second: Kim has as much rope as the Chinese want him to have; the notion that they're as "concerned" as the rest of the world is just ridiculous. It's like suggesting that if Mexico were test-firing rockets into the Gulf and we went to the UN to tell the world our hands were tied the world would buy it. North Korea is China's left jab in the Pacific, and it's being thrown to feel out a United States which is proving to be the Primo Carnera of international diplomacy.