by Rod D. Martin
January 6, 2016

So North Korea detonated what they call an H-Bomb. Our guys are saying it’s “just” an “enhanced” nuclear device.

I’m sure you find that a comforting distinction.

North Korea has done this on Barack Obama’s watch. And it got me thinking, which of our other enemies achieved nuclear status under which Presidents?

The last ones were India and Pakistan (and to be fair, they weren’t exactly enemies, but they’re enemies of each other, and a war between them could easily kill 300 million initially and blanket the world in fallout). That was 1998; ergo, Bill Clinton.

North Korea tested its first atomic weapon in 2006 (Bush), but the deal that made that possible — like the Iran deal now — was signed in 1994 (Clinton). And say what you want about Bush, but Saddam Hussein will never have a nuclear weapon, and under Bush, Libya handed over its entire nuclear weapons program to the United States. Its remains are sitting in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to this day.

Apartheid-era South Africa — not exactly enemies, but not people you want to have nukes — got the Bomb in 1979. Thank you Jimmy Carter. It dismantled them after signing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1991. Thank you George H.W. Bush.

China got the Bomb during LBJ’s presidency. Russia got the Bomb under Harry Truman’s…and wouldn’t have but for massive security breaches for which the Truman Administration was absolutely responsible. Russia stole the Bomb, and you can thank Truman and Roosevelt appointees for that, and thus for the entire Cold War and “Mutual Assured Destruction” the world lived under for decades.

That leaves only U.S. allies (France, Britain and Israel). I’m not too worried about any of them, are you?

And of course, let us not forget that Obama basically just gave Iran the Bomb, which means Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey (among others) will immediately start working to get their own.

So what have we learned from North Korea today?

We’ve learned that the surest effect of electing a Democrat President (aside from tax hikes and more government intrusion) is that someone who hates America and wants to destroy us will absolutely get the means to do so. Every single blooming time.

Congratulations, Dems!

•••••••

UPDATE 1: Be sure to see our article “Ferocious, Weak and Crazy: The North Korean Strategy,” in which George Friedman unpacks what North Korea is really up to, in this and in all things.

•••••••

UPDATE 2: By the way, a close friend pointed something out offline that serves to illustrate my point (which, just to be clear, is not that Bill Clinton personally went to Pakistan and constructed a Bomb for them). He noted that India actually tested a nuclear weapon under the Nixon Administration.

And that is absolutely true. But two things stand out about that.

First, India was not then and is not now an enemy of the United States (and remember what I said at the outset, that American enemies have gotten the Bomb under every Democrat President).

But second, and I think more important: India then renounced the deployment of any actual nuclear weapons. It demonstrated the capability, and then stood down, unquestionably as a result of Nixon and Kissinger’s diplomacy (if memory serves, you can read about this in the latter’s second volume of memoirs, Years of Upheaval, which to be fair I last read in 1983, so my apologies if that’s not the right one).

By contrast, after a quarter century of forbearance, Pakistan and India both went nuclear under Clinton, with large deployed forces that may yet prove the source of the greatest human disaster ever.

This has happened under every single Democrat President since nuclear weapons were invented (again, except for the one who died early). This has not happened under any Republican, except in consequence of the nuclear deal Bill Clinton negotiated with North Korea. And it’s probably worth noting that Clinton’s lead negotiator in those pathetic talks was none other than Walter Mondale, who would have been President had the Democrats won in 1984.

That’s a 70 year pattern. So let’s just say this. If you had a child who was always really careful with the car, and you had another child who somehow “accidentally” always got into wrecks, which one would you feel safer handing the keys to?

We’re deciding who to hand the keys to right now. The person the Democrats are offering us was part of most of this, for four years as Secretary of State. I’m not super stoked about her track record so far.