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The question is: Why is American intelligence "scrambling" to determine if North Korea's telling the truth or not about A-bomb readiness? Hasn't this threat been on the front burner? Here's the first couple of paragraphs of a NY Times story:

North Korea Says It Has Made Fuel for Atom Bombs
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, July 14 — North Korean officials told the Bush administration last week that they had finished producing enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear bombs, and that they intended to move ahead quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior American officials said today.

The new declaration set off a scramble in American intelligence agencies — under fire for their assessment of Iraq's nuclear capability — to determine if the North Korean government of Kim Jong Il was bluffing or had succeeded in producing the material undetected.

The intelligence agencies already have that information, they are sharing with Congress on a very limited basis. The less the public "knows", the better. The response options have already been discussed.

What's going to happen is, we are going to, formally, go into Liberia, THEN Korea will make it's play, with an above ground nuclear bomb test.

Then we are all in big doo doo !

The question Bush will face then, 1) to conduct surgical, tactical air strikes to destroy the various NK nuclear facilities, or 2) send ground troops over the border of NK.

The ploy for NK is to wait, until the US is more over extended, with ground troops in other world locations, and in the court of public opinion. Like all things, it's all in the timing.

I can't help but suspect that we're not hearing much about this because BushCo knows that the public will demand the sort of response they've become accustomed to: kicking ass. And I also suspect BushCo knows that taking on NK will be harder and more costly (in terms of dollars and lives) than Iraq or Afghanistan were.

"What? North Korea? Um... Well... Hey, look over there -- we caught the seven of clubs!"

Ryan

Good point, Ryan, but I don't know as I give this administration enough credit to have kept mum so as to keep American's testosterone levels in check. What *is* indisputable, though, is that options re: North Korea are limited and none are terribly appealing.

Kim Jong Il, in spite of being the ugliest current world leader [with absolutely the worst haircut to have ever made it to the front page of any newspaper at any time since trees were first felled for the purpose of making pulp], is a surprisingly shrewd guy. Sure it's all blackmail. But why not? He's holding the trump cards. Either he'll get huge infusions of cash, food, electric power and the like, or there will be a preemptive strike. Personally, given *this* particular American administration, I think the odds are against Kim's lasting long enough to pass the baton on to a successor.