France to NoKo: Ha Ha, You Failed
"France said outright for the first time Wednesday that North Korea's proclaimed nuclear test produced such a small blast that it must have failed, and analysts warned such challenging talk could lead Pyongyang to try again," the Associated Press reports from Paris:
France's Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said French, American and other scientists had detected a blast of "relatively limited size."
"In any case, if this was a nuclear explosion, it would be a case of a failed explosion," she said on Europe-1 radio.
Such speculation about a dud test could be read as a challenge by Kim Jong Il, the North's reclusive leader, to consider carrying out a second test to prove naysayers wrong, analysts said.
Or to prove them right!
Bloomberg commentator Andy Mukherjee argues that the supposed nuke test strengthens the position of dictator Kim Jong Il, and this redounds to the benefit of selfish South Koreans:
If Kim had not engaged in this nuclear brinkmanship, his murderous rule would have stood little chance of surviving the ongoing U.S. attempts to choke it financially.
And that outcome--a sudden collapse of the North Korean political system leading to a hasty reunification on the peninsula--would have been a bigger risk for investors in South Korea who have for many years lived with the threat of Kim eventually testing fissile material.
A decade ago, researchers at the Institute for International Economics in Washington worked out the "cost of unification," which they defined as the investment that would need to be made in North Korea to raise average income to 60 percent of what's enjoyed in the prosperous, democratic South.
That's about as much inequality as can be tolerated in a unified Korea without the social and economic upheaval of mass migration. According to the researchers, the cost of such a merger would have been $1.7 trillion in 2000, a fivefold increase from an equally hypothetical $319 billion in 1990.
The younger generations of South Koreans, who will have to shoulder the bulk of the burden, might balk at the price.
The likely alternative, of course, is continued oppression and starvation of the 23 million Koreans in the north. If this is what their cousins in the south prefer, it doesn't speak well of the latter's national character.
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