What I was looking for when I ran across the old link discussed in my previous post was the lead story from the NYT’s Week In Review section.

It was all about how scary the North Korean missile tests are, seeing as how:

    Perhaps everyone can learn from failure, even the North Koreans.
    Their missile, the Taepodong 2, took flight briefly last week, and seems to be in no shape to send an atom bomb whizzing halfway around the globe toward the United States. Experts judge that many years of testing beyond that inaugural flight on Tuesday will probably be needed before the North would entrust the new missile with anything as costly and precious as a nuclear warhead.
    "It would take five or six tests of their final design before they’d be confident it could go someplace," said Harold M. Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, which designed most of the nation’s nuclear arms.

So, it will be "several years" before the Dear Doofus is likely to boost some warheads our way. That’s good.

At the same time, that assumption seems based on the belief that North Korea will act rationally, not throwing away the first nuke they manage to produce. That’s weak assurance.

I gain more comfort from the caption on this propaganda poster, which the Times assures us reads, "First sound of gunfire from big power."

Really? Even allowing for idiomatic and stylistic differences between cultures, or poor translation, that is amazingly awkward and uninspiring. And, well, stupid.

How am I supposed to take seriously a threat from someone who can’t write any better than that?

They ought to require essay contests or something before letting bad guys into the Axis of Evil.

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