As South Korean spies ended weeks of speculation by revealing the mundane cause of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s recent absence from public view (ankle surgery), a much more ominous bit of news was simultaneously reported: North Korea has begun work on a submarine-based nuclear missile launching system. With present technology, North Korea may be able to strike Alaska, or perhaps Washington state. With sub-based missiles, they could potentially hit any city in the US. While this project will take years, the long-term prospects are chilling. And no matter how conservatives try to wriggle out from under the inescapable truth, blame for North Korea’s nuclearization falls squarely on the Bush Duh administration.

A little background info is crucial. There are just two paths to creating a nuclear fission weapon. One uses uranium, which involves a technologically complex enrichment process. The other uses plutonium, and is much quicker – if you have a ready supply of plutonium, which can be readily produced in certain kinds of nuclear reactors.

When Bill Clinton came to the White House in 1993 – fresh out of Little Rock, without a scintilla of foreign policy experience – he inherited a Korean peninsula already in nuclear crisis. Clinton competently negotiated a deal, and under the 1994 “Agreed Framework,” North Korea halted its uranium enrichment program, and also shut down its plutonium-producing nuclear plant – blocking both paths to nuclearization. In exchange, the US promised to build North Korea two new nuclear plants – of a kind that could not be harnessed to manufacture weapons – and to supply them with fuel oil in the interim. The Agreed Framework also put the US and North Korea on track for improved relations.

Fun fact: North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor – source of its weapons-grade plutonium – was constructed on Ronald Reagan’s watch, during 1980-86.

Enter Bush Duh. Late in 2002, the US accused North Korea of violating the Agreed Framework by restarting its uranium enrichment program. Whether or not that’s true, in the 21 years since the Agreed Framework was signed, North Korea has never detonated a uranium-based nuclear weapon. What is true is that the US failed to follow through on its promises to build two new reactors and deliver fuel oil. The reactors were far behind schedule, and oil shipments were often delayed – all because conservatives in Congress opposed the agreement, and sought to sabotage it by withholding funding. This makes it particularly laughable for conservatives to blame North Korean nukes on Clinton, since they did everything they could to undermine his otherwise effective policies.

And so because of congressional conservatives, North Korea had legitimate gripes about the US failing to keep up its end of the bargain. With ham-handed diplomacy, Bush Duh so thoroughly alienated North Korea that they pulled out of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, restarted their Yongbyon reactor, and – while Bush Duh slept – they ran it for two years, producing enough plutonium to build several bombs. Duh dozed on as North Korea shut the reactor down, extracted the plutonium, and got to work. They successfully detonated their first nuclear weapon in late 2006 – during Duh’s 6th year in the White House.

Bush Duh followed up that 6 year snooze-a-thon with inaction in the face of North Korea’s missile tests, as the North worked on the development of a nuclear weapons delivery system to allow them to strike US allies, as well as the US mainland. He was, after all, quite busy in Iraq, confirming what UN inspectors said before the US invasion: that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Duh!