■"Officials Discount Nuclear Suspicion In N. Korea Blast," by Anthony Faiola and Joohee Cho, Washington Post, 13 September 2004, p. A15.

Do I think Kim is working hard on missiles and nukes? Absolutely. Do I think he might have been pushing hard for some symbolic nuke test on the anniversary of the founding of North Korea in 1948? Weirdos like him typically love that sort of stuff. Do I think Kim feels like he's being progressively cornered by the U.S. and that China's patience for his shenanigans will inevitably run out so he better grab his nuke mantle while he can? Yes, that is exactly what I expect.

But I do discount the notion that what happened was the actual nuke test we all fear and expect Kim will someday soon unleash. Why? The "horse diagnosis" here seems as compelling (even more so) than the "zebra diagnosis," meaning the simpler answer is probably a screw-up, an accident, a genuine snafu. Everybody thinks that an authoritarian system runs like clockwork, when in reality it tends to be amazingly inefficient, and it's primarily in that stunning inefficiency that control is maintained. So this blast is probably just an accident, like the one in April. They have accidents in authoritarian countriesóplenty of them. It's just because they go to such lengths to hide them that we tend to fall back on zebra answers when the horse diagnosis will do.

None of this changes anything. We still need to push hard on Kim. He still needs to go down, and soon. We still need that takedown to occur with the strong partnership of China, Japan, and Russia. The reunification of Korea still needs to serve as cornerstone for an East Asia NATO. We need that NATO so we can reduce troops there and get our bases realigned more toward the Gap and this Global War on Terrorism.

But the blast does serves as some nice pretext, not that much is needed with Kim, who's probably got about 3 millions shortened lives on his conscience alreadyóif he had one, that is.