Women, Wine and Weapons Newsweek's Guide to Kim Jong II.



Kim has little to hold on to besides his weapons of mass destruction. He surely has large stocks of chemical and biological weapons and may have a couple of crude nuclear devices. Now that he has kicked U.N. arms inspectors out of the Yongbyon nuclear-reactor complex, the CIA estimates that he can probably extract enough weapons-grade plutonium to build a half-dozen bombs within six months. Potentially, they can be used to blackmail the world into providing food and fuel. Few experts believe that if Kim builds nuclear weapons, he will use them against South Korea, Japan or the United States. But he might sell them to terrorists. Kim already makes most of his foreign exchange by selling missile technology to countries like Syria and Pakistan. Why not sell a nuke to Al Qaeda? If he can’t already, he may soon be able to put a nuclear device on a plane or in the hold of a ship and send it to the Middle East (or Los Angeles Harbor).

North Korea poses a much bigger threat than Iraq with fewer favorable ways for the US to deal with without risking hundreds of thousands of people.