This Week You Need To Know


Will Cheney Detonate His Other Nuclear Option?

A Memorial Day appearance by Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, on the Larry King Live show on CNN, has provoked worldwide concern that the Bush Administration could be contemplating a nuclear "sneak attack" against North Korea in the very near future. In response to a question from King, the Vice President delivered a series of threats and provocative insults against North Korea, labeling President Kim Jong-il "one of the world's most irresponsible leaders," who directs a "police state," and "wants to throw his weight around and become a nuclear power." "But," Cheney went on, "if this happens, North Korea will never have normal relations with the rest of the world." Cheney threatened to go to the United Nations Security Council to impose murderous sanctions against Pyongyang.

Not surprisingly, Cheney's televised provocations produced a direct public attack by North Korean officials against the Vice President. The Foreign Ministry issued a statement, declaring, "Cheney is hated as the most cruel monster and bloodthirsty beast, as he has drenched various parts of the world in blood." The statement went on to say, "What Cheney uttered at a time when the issue of the six-party talks is high on the agenda, is little short of telling the D.P.R.K. not to come out for the talks."

The exchange, willfully provoked by the U.S. Vice President, has caused widespread apprehension, particularly in Europe, that the Bush Administration is prepared, now, to carry out an attack against the Korean peninsula, using the only military capability available—mini-nuclear weapons. As EIR reported in a cover story two weeks ago, the Pentagon has finalized a new "global strike" doctrine, CONPLAN-8022, which, for the first, time, integrates mini-nuclear weapons into the "conventional" arsenal. Despite a decade-old Congressional ban on the development and deployment of mini-nukes, the Bush Administration has produced an unspecified number of B-61 "mod 11" small-scale "bunker buster" nuclear warheads, that can be delivered by Stealth bombers, and even by F-16 fighter jets. Stealth bombers have been recently pre-positioned in South Korea by the U.S. Air Force. Given the Bush-Cheney new national security doctrine of preventive and pre-emptive war, there is good reason for the world to shudder, that the lunatics in the Washington Administration could make good on Cheney's blustering threats.

The Bush Administration, and particularly Vice President Cheney and David Addington (his inhouse wanna-be Carl Schmitt, the crown jurist of the Nazi regime), recently suffered a stunning defeat in the United States Senate, when a bipartisan group of 14 Senators blocked the so-called "nuclear option," which would have barred the use of filibusters against judicial nominees. Predictably, the White House has gone wild, in response to this stinging defeat of what Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) had called a Cheney-led attempted "coup d'état" against the U.S. Constitution.

Indicative of the insanity coming out of the White House "lame duck show," is the recent firing of Securities and Exchange Commission head William Donaldson, and his replacement by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), a notorious "Gingrich Revolution" ideologue, who will crush all efforts to re-regulate the derivatives activities of the big Wall Street banks, and thus accelerate the collapse of the entire multi-trillion-dollar hedge-fund industry. Lyndon LaRouche has denounced the Cox appointment as a continuation of the "Enron Syndrome" by the Bush crowd.

The word around Washington and other capitals around the globe is: Patriotic U.S. Senators killed one coup attempt by Cheney and company. Will the Cheneyacs now activate Dick Cheney's "other nuclear option"?

One well-placed Washington source recounted a discussion several years back, with a neo-conservative insider. The neo-con boasted that, following the invasion of Iraq, the Bush-Cheney Administration would move militarily against Syria and Iran. But before leaving office, the neo-con insider boasted, Team Bush would take direct action against North Korea. "We will use nuclear weapons against Pyongyang," he promised. "And this will be intended first and foremost as a message to China."