Foreign Policy magazine notes that Rudy Giuliani apparently doesn’t know whether it’s Iran or North Korea that currently has the bomb (citing a New York Times article):
At a house party in New Hampshire, Mr. Giuliani suggested that it was unclear which was farther along, Iran or North Korea, in the development of a nuclear weapons program.
For the record, North Korea tested a nuclear device on October 9, 2006, while the Iranians have yet to do so. The U.S. intelligence community believes Iran could have a nuclear weapon as early as 2010, but most likely in the time frame of 2012-2015.
This is the man whose foreign policy advisor wants to bomb Iran.
Seriously, this is more than an “embarassing goof,” as FP put it. It betrays a serious ignorance of the most important national security issues. To not know whether North Korea or Iran is further along is to be ignorant not only of the current strategic situation in East Asia and the Middle East, but of the entire story of how the Koreans ended up testing a nuclear weapon. They did so in large part thanks to serious American policy blunders.
For years, the Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea had prevented the very real prospect of the Koreans developing a plutonium bomb. The US abandoned the Agreed Framework in 2002, over American contentions that North Korea was developing a highly enriched uranium (HEU) program. Once the US had ditched the Agreed Framework, the Koreans went ahead and made nukes – real nukes – from the plutonium program that the Framework had been keeping in check. Earlier this year, the administration admitted that it never had any real evidence that the Koreans were pursuing an HEU program. The administration had listened to its tough-talking neocon advisors and blundered its way into giving North Korea the bomb.
This isn’t the population of Tuvalu or the chief exports of Nepal. This is about learning the lessons of a catastrophic mistake in one of the most serious foreign policy areas facing us today. That Giuliani knows none of this suggests that he is completely unprepared to be president; frankly, it scares me.
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