Armageddon? Probably not.
So North Korea let off a big one. Well that’s certainly going to make life a lot more interesting. If the US does not attack North Korea, which it won’t because China won’t allow it (China holds the US purse strings these days - piss them off too much and they dump the $US reserves they have and sink the US economy to essentially unrecoverable levels) they will have lost pretty much any leverage they could have over Iran. No one believes for a second that Israel does not have US supplied atomic weapons (they’ve never tested one and we know they have them so someone must have supplied them with working weapons and who else would it be) so the US can not make the case that there are no nuclear countries in the middle east and thus Iran should be stopped. Sorry that won’t wash.
Right now you have the US, Russia, Great Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and now North Korea in the nuclear club (have I missed anyone, not counting former SSRs that might have some unaccounted for ones still in their possession?). The genie is well out of the bag and there is no stopping anyone that wants to get a club membership. MAD still applies, although the chances of an accidental exchange certainly increases the more members there are in the club.
To use excuses such as Iran’s leader is a madman and if he has nukes he’ll use them on Israel is, well just plain stupid. He may be a fanatic but he’s not, by any means, stupid. The Iranian leadership knows full well that launching any kind of nuclear attack against Israel or any other US ally would result in Iran being reduced to a charred radiocative rubble, especially with madmen like Bush. Cheney and Rumsfeld in office.
Nuclear weapons are like the codpieces men used to wear in Elizabeathan times, or George wore on his Mission Accomplished mission - bragging rights - mine is bigger than yours so there. They also increase your bargaining position at any negotiations. Iran with nukes means the US and Israel can not do what they want anymore in the middle east, at least not as easily, and that’s the real reason the Us is trying to block them. North Korea may have just handed a membership in the club to Iran by defanging the US’s threats. It remains to be seen what the UN will do about this recent event but don’t forget that North Korea’s biggest trading partner is China and what China wants for NK China will get.
