A huge explosion in the northern part of North Korea sent a plume of smoke more than two miles wide into the air on an important anniversary of the secretive communist regime, a South Korean news agency reported Sunday. …

”We understand that a mushroom-shaped cloud about 3.5 to 4 kilometers (2.1 to 2.5 miles) in diameter was monitored during the explosion,” the news agency quoted an unidentified diplomatic source in Seoul, the South Korean capital, as saying. (source)

Whatever it was, it’s not good. Something damned big blew up there on Thursday, for the mushroom cloud to be more than 2 miles across. If it’s not nuclear, then I have no idea what it could be. Powell is saying that it’s not nuclear, and one would assume that if it were a nuke, Powell wouldn’t be quite so definitive. We’ll probably find out what it was in a few days.

Initial reports have a U.S. official claiming it was a forest fire. That’s gotta be some forest fire… but in all seriousness, it can’t be that. So what is it? If it is nuclear, then Bush is in huge trouble. Remember his statement, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Considering the advancements made with North korea under a Democratic president, and how Bush immediately blew all of that off and called North Korea “evil,” a nuclear test by that country would be greatly embarrassing. It should also be noted that the explosion happened on a keynote date (the anniversary of North Korea’s foundation), which would be a logical day for something like a first successful nuclear test.

It should also be noted that this also comes at about the same time as a revelation that South Korea started enriching uranium four years ago with America not objecting, throwing yet another wrench into the whole situation.

But this should be a reminder of one other important fact: Kim Jong Il is still there, and still a greater threat to his own people and to us than Saddam Hussein ever was. North Korea is still developing nuclear weapons when Hussein was doing nothing even close to that. People in North Korea are unimaginably more oppressed than Iraqis ever were. And yet we went into Iraq, first under the pretense that Hussein was building nukes, which later (when WMD were never found) morphed into a humanitarian mission because the Iraqis were so terrorized by their leader. Both of those excuses are shown up as feeble in light of the threat of North Korea. I’m not saying that we should have invaded North Korea instead, I’m pointing out that the reasons given for invading Iraq were, to put it kindly, false.

The current situation also begs the question, what has Bush been doing about North Korea? Because as far as I can tell, he’s been doing pretty much nothing at all.