A North Korean Bomb?

spiked A North Korean Bomb? Not the end of the world:

"North Korea’s reported nuclear test hardly ranks as a ‘show of strength’ from this impoverished and desperate state where, as one satirical website commented after reports that the explosion had been smaller than expected, ‘even the nukes are starving’. It does, however, provide further evidence of the impotence of US and Western foreign policy.

Kim Jong-il’s regime may have built and exploded a nuclear bomb. But the rogue state of North Korea was largely created in Washington.

Thrashing about for some sense of purpose in American foreign policy, President George Bush and his advisers invented the ‘axis of evil’ almost overnight, basically as a snappy catchphrase for his 2002 State of the Union address. North Korea was given official pariah status, along with Iraq and Iran. The Bush administration abandoned its predecessor’s tentative steps to normalise relations with North Korea, and instead set up Kim Jong-il as another little Hitler against whom to show its moral resolution. "