In an announcement that surprises no one, the North Koreans told the world that they have built nuclear weapons and plan on keeping them, on order to keep the "freedom and democracy" that their subject have "chosen" alive from the dangers of the Bush administration:

"We ... have manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration's ever more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the (North)," the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency. ... North Korea's "nuclear weapons will remain (a) nuclear deterrent for self-defense under any circumstances," the ministry said. It said Washington's alleged attempt to topple the North's regime "compels us to take a measure to bolster its nuclear weapons arsenal in order to protect the ideology, system, freedom and democracy chosen by its people."

The AP reports that the Kim regime had admitted in private talks much earlier on that they had nukes, but the North Koreans kept it from public consumption, presumably hoping that the West could be extorted into keeping it quiet. The knowledge of their work and capacity goes back to 2002, when North Korea announced it had cheated on the Agreed Framework nonsense that the Clinton administration arranged with Kim, where Kim promised not to build nuclear weapons and we built nuclear power plants in exchange.

All this proves is the folly of appeasement, an option unfortunately forced on the Clintons by their friend Jimmy Carter, who sailed into the North Korean negotiations uninvited and dropped this Munich descendant onto the table. Tyrants do not willingly disarm; they need all the weapons which they can get in order to protect themselves from the people around them, including (and especially) their own subjects. To believe otherwise is folly, and as shown in North Korea, catastrophically deadly folly.

Hopefully, the EU-3 can take a lesson from this in their dealings with Iran. So far, though, it looks like they're trying to run the Jimmy Carter playbook as well.

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