And you thought all he had was nukes and the might of Songun

From Popular Mechanics:

Watching the United Nations Security Council grind its way to a compromise resolution on North Korea, it's hard to avoid returning to one question: What took them so long to do something about North Korea's weapons of mass destruction? Over the past 45 years, North Korea has assembled a huge arsenal of mass casualty weapons - namely biological and chemical weapons. Yet it is only when North Korea gets as far as possible nuclear capability the U.N. rouses itself from its slumbers and waddles into action.

I've been writing and researching the subject of biological and chemical warfare on and off for six years. The extent of North Korea's completely operational biochemical warfare program is widely known and frequently assessed by the U.S. and its allies, as well as many non-proliferation organizations such as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in The Hague in the Netherlands. North Korea’s program has been in development since the '60s under the control of the fabulously Orwellian Fifth Machine Industry Bureau. In that time, North Korea's Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) program has assembled a formidable array of poisons, toxins, chemicals and weaponized germs.

The consensus among weapons inspectors, intelligence analysts, academics and others I have interviewed—–which is backed up by the available open source material—-is that North Korea has developed anthrax, plague and botulism toxin as weapons and has extensively researched at least six other germs including smallpox and typhoid. It is also believed to have 5,000 tons or more of mustard gas, sarin nerve agent and phosgene (a choking gas). The Center for Nonproliferation Studies says North Korea ranks "amongst the largest possessors of chemical weaponry in the world." South Korea's military estimates half of North's long-range missiles and 30 percent of its artillery are CBW capable.

John Bolton, now leading the charge at the U.N., gave a speech in 2002 as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, in which he stated: "North Korea has a dedicated, national level effort to achieve a BW capacity and has developed and produced and may have weaponized, BW agents .... the leadership in Pyongyang has spent large sums of money to acquire the resources ..... capable of producing infectious agents, toxins and other crude biological weapons. It likely has the capability to produce sufficient quantities of biological agents for military purposes within weeks of deciding to do so and has a variety of means at its disposal for delivering these deadly weapons."

Yet, in the four years since that speech, no one involved in the monitoring of North Korea can point to a determined (or even tentative) front-of-stage or behind-the-scenes effort to rein in North Korea's CBW arsenal. The country is a signatory to the Biological Toxin and Weapons Convention, but as this convention does not mandate independent inspections, we have no idea if it is abiding by it. (The answer is “no,” according to just about everyone.) And North Korea is the only nation that has neither signed, acceded to or is IN negotiations to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, which does enforce inspections.

So why have we done nothing? Apparently, we have fallen prey to what former weapons inspector Christopher Davis has dubbed "nuclear blindness", which he defines as "the tunnel vision suffered by successive governments, brought on by the mistaken belief that it only the size of the bang that matters."

Read the rest, Imperialist stooges! (Hat tip: Insta-Imperialist)

Tags: Kim Jong Il, biological weapons, nukes, germs, North Korea