LYCOS RETRIEVER 
North Korea: Kim Jong Il
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George W. Bush gave his fourth prime-time news conference and took a firm stance against North Korea. “Perhaps Kim Jong Il has got the capacity to launch a weapon,” he said. “Wouldn't it be nice to be able to shoot it down?” North Korea then fired a missile into the Sea of Japan.
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In 1994, the administration of President Bill Clinton had begun preparations for military action against North Korea when former President Jimmy Carter traveled to North Korea in June and extracted a promise from Kim Jong Il to freeze nuclear production. 1 The Agreed Framework was signed on Oct. 21, 1994.
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Obviously, it would be reckless not to worry about North Korea’s missile and WMD technologies. In August, there were reports yet again that Kim Jong Il was preparing an underground nuclear test. And the North test fired seven missiles in July. According to U.S. data, three of the missiles were Scud-Cs, and three were No-dong-As with ranges of 300 to 1,000 miles; all were capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. (Whether North Korea has such warheads is not definitively known, but it is widely believed to have in the neighborhood of ten—and the KFR certainly has the materials and technological know-how to build them.) The third type of missile, a Taep’o-dong-2, has a range of 2,300 to 9,300 miles, which means it could conceivably hit the continental United States. Though the Taep’o-dong-2 failed after takeoff during the recent testing, it did so at the point of maximum dynamic pressure—the same point where the space shuttle Challenger exploded, and the moment when things are most likely to go wrong.
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The authors in the current issue of The American Enterprise magazine paint a sometimes terrifying picture of North Korea. Kim Jong Il’s mad regime has never formally renounced its pledge to swallow up the southern half of the Korean peninsula, even if it takes a devastating conventional war to do it. And its recent nuclear announcements have given citizens of Tokyo—possibly even Los Angeles—cause for serious concern.
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The furor over Kim Jong Il’s missile tests and nuclear brinksmanship obscures the real threat: the prospect of North Korea’s catastrophic collapse. How the regime ends could determine the balance of power in Asia for decades. The likely winner? China
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Kim Jong Il