Free Republic

Senator John Kerry's gaffe in outing an undercover CIA analyst at this week's confirmation hearing for John Bolton has been widely noted. Mr. Kerry used Fulton Armstrong's name when questioning Mr. Bolton about whether he tried to have the Latin America analyst reassigned. But that's a foot fault compared with what the Democrat from Massachusetts had to say about Mr. Bolton and Kim Jong Il. It seems Mr. Bolton once uttered some pungent remarks about the totalitarian North Korean leader and the "hellish nightmare" in which his people live. And in Monday's hearing Mr. Kerry chided Mr. Bolton for speaking...

Siegfried Hecker, sitting in a cold conference room, was asked by his North Korean hosts if he would like to see their "product." "Yes," Dr. Hecker replied. "Do you mean plutonium?" Hecker, former director of the U.S. weapons lab at Los Alamos and familiar with the hazardous properties of plutonium, was surprised when two technicians carried a small red metal box into the room. Inside was a white wooden box containing two glass jars -- they looked like marmalade jars -- one containing a piece of plutonium metal, the other plutonium powder. He later asked if he could hold the...

North Korea’s armed forces are capable of carrying out 13 kinds of viral and bacterial attack, the South Korean Government said yesterday in one of the most detailed assessments of the dictatorship’s biological weapons arsenal. In a submission to the South Korean National Assembly, the Defence Minister also said that the North had 5,000 tonnes of chemical weapons, believed to include mustard gas, phosgene and sarin. Among its biological agents are cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, typhus, typhoid fever and dysentery. Despite the alarming assessment, Kim Tae Young also said that his country’s armed forces had the capacity pre-emptively to destroy...