Competitive Lunacy

"The nuclear power and missile research institutes in the North and Iran are effectively one body. North Korean nuclear and missile scientists are in Iran and Iranian scientists are in the North. They share everything."

This is testimony related to a conservative newspaper in Seoul, South Korea, the Chosun Ilbo, by a defecting North Korean official. It cannot come as a surprise to anyone. But it does not represent good news. Merely confirmation of what has long been theorized. And it took no great stretch of the imagination to do that, either.

Iran has been funding North Korea in that country's advances toward nuclear enrichment. And North Korea has been assisting Iran in its more fumbling attempts at nuclear enrichment. Each of the countries happen to be outlier nations, belligerent and impressively averse to freedom and human rights, particularly for their own populations.

Hunger and deprivation is present in both countries, although clearly not as rampant in Iran as it is in North Korea. Iranians are deprived of their freedoms, they live in a fundamentalist Islamist theocracy where every aspect of their lives is circumscribed by ruling Ayatollahs, and much is proscribed. While North Koreans exist under the baleful thumb of a secularist totalitarian, careless of the desperate state of the deprived population.

The diverse ideologies, one political, the other religious-political, still have much in common. Irredentism for one commonality, violent aggression in word and in deed against their neighbours. Above all, a determination to succeed in attaining nuclear power status for themselves, as rogue powers unsettling the world at large by their leaders' egomanaical neuroticism.

Just as Pyongyang so recently proudly revealed its production success in a new hitherto-unknown nuclear enrichment installation, so too has Iran done likewise, although not voluntarily disclosed. The duplicitous assurances given to the concerned international community of peaceful use of nuclear energy does not truly equate with the incendiary attitudes of the two countries against their neighbours.

The American nuclear scientist, Siegfried Hecker who recently revealed his shock at inspecting North Korea's unsuspected installation at Yongbyon is alarmed at the risk of North Korea exporting weapons materials to Iran. "What we saw, 2,000 centrifuges, that's about twice what Iran has done so far. I worry about co-operation with Iran."

He has gone out of his way in his concern, this former head of the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, to attempt to convince Washington it must set three red lines for North Korea: 1. no new bombs; 2. no bigger bombs; 3. no export of nuclear material. Just how might that be enforced? Particularly with China's avuncular support of North Korea?

What a collaborative effort: Iran's engineers helping to design and build the North Korean centrifuges, and North Korea's scientists eagerly proffering some of the end result to Iran, which is experiencing no little amount of difficulty in enriching uranium.

One hell, two devils.