Assuming the author is genuinely confused about the answer to his Title (most likely a very weak "gotcha"), I offer one answer: Because we did not do that(plus Afghanistan) and of what we did do/allowed to be done in Somalia, Sudan, Kenya,Yemen during the wasted decade of the 90's...That is why we will be on orange alerts for another decade even after the last dictator falls.

I'd wholeheartedly agree with bombing North Korea's bomb facilities if it weren't for one thing. That would immediately result in an invasion of South Korea and start a war with North Korea, and while we'd definitely win that war, we'd incur thousands of casualties, and considering how badly people are taking the miniscule casualties in Iraq, incuring thousands of casualties in NK would be political suicide. While I don't normally advocate putting political concerns over security concerns, President Dean would mean an end to any practical War on Terror and that's an even greater security risk.

How Ironic, Truman's failure in North Korea was not in refusing to let McArthur go as far as he wanted to, but in fighting it at all. A unified Korea under NK control would have no American Troops in harm's way and therefore no reason not to bomb the heck out the reactors.

Another problem with bombing North Korea's bomb facilities: it might not even work. They're a paranoid country with lots of slave labor and at least a rough idea of our surveillance capabilties. I suspect they'd built very deep, hardened, camouflaged facilities that we night not even be able to take out.

Yeah, communist countries are known for the quality of their construction...

Why use checkers moves in a chess game? Our coolness to Taiwan's little flurry would indicate that the PRC is expected to carry the ball with NK. Winter has just started, the period of NK's greatest need for fuel. Beijing has already demonstrated its' ability to close off NK's access to fuel oil. Iran remains the only other source of oil still dealing with NK (Gadaffi having had his Damascene moment). With the Libya-Iran-NK nexus broken Iran has little to gain from NK. One might be able to detect some sort of master plan (or move toward shak-mat) if one were to examine events outside of their immediate context. China has already put five divisions on the NK border (to "discourage" refugees from NK).

NK in the winter/spring amd Iran in the spring/summer. China gaining world status as a "peace maker" and the Axis of Evil eliminated before elections. Pipe dreams, I suppose.

Korea is China's problem, and Bush is right to leave it for them. America taking a more active role on the peninsula would be seen in Pyongyang as a victory. If we do nothing, this will look like another foreign policy victory for Bush come November.

OJ, reinforced concrete and dirt aren't exactly high-tech materials. True, lots of communist apartment buildings are made of crappy concrete, but I'll bet their missile silos and command bunkers are better quality.

Plus, we can't assume anything is going to break our way, because the worst outcome is to attack but not succeed at destroying their nuclear facilities.

Personally, I'd suggest that, first, certain NK ships disappear mysteriously on the high seas.

Papaya:

Why? Their nuclear subs, spacecraft, etc. all sucked too.

Because mastering the art or building reinforced concrete is a heck of a lot easier than building nuclear subs. And not all Communist tech sucked. Their spacecraft are actually quite reliable, and Lockheed bought a bunch of their big RD-180 liquid-fuel rocket engines.

Papaya, OJ -

I read a year or two ago that NK had the equivalent of entire cities built underground, which would (if true of course) underscore Papaya's point. The government had to spend money on something, and it sure wasn't food or social services.

OJ:
Nature, not communism built the mountains. That is where the tunnels are.

Our nukes are useless against hardened, buried targets. Our conventional weapons are better, but put enough of nature's rock on top, and there just isn't a heck of a lot we can do to them.

The Kims built the tunnels, which means they'd likely cave in. The Kims built the missiles which means they're unlikely to work--ditto the bombs, if any.

T-34.

Wide tracks and a heavily cast turret Harry. When we got the 3.5" bazookas to Korea they took those turrets off clean.

The ubiquitous RPG's and the kalishnakovs may be crude, but they work OJ.

The P.R.N.K. are becoming the "untouchables" and will collapse from within eventually. We have bigger fish to fry right now. The CPR, S.K., Russian oil interests on Sakhalin(sp?) and Japan can hold it together in their pond while we fish elsewhere.

Ok, so their missiles won't work. Except for the ones that already have.

Do you always whistle when walking by graveyards?

Of course, the dead are no more threat than the Kims.

It had a very good run, Genecis, and was far better than any tank the US made at the time.

No weapon maintains its superiority forever.

Later Russian subs were made mostly of titanium, very expensive and tough.

Taking all in all, diesels and nukes together, the catastrophic failure rate for US and USSR subs was about the same -- around 1%.

Some of the decisions the Soviets made were as stupid as the ones we get out of Congress, like building the world's largest telescope in an area that is overcast more than half the time. But they did better when it really counted. Their field artillery was second-to-none for a long time.

It would be a mistake to assume that because a political system is rickety that all of its component parts are inferior. The US assumed that about Japan and had most of its navy sunk by torpedoes that were better than ours by about the same gap as between a Brown Bess musket and a Maxim gun.

Those wide tracks served them well on the Steppes; a remarkable response to a problem the Germans didn't/couldn't respond to at the time. I don't think the T-34 outclassed the Tigers overall though. Our adaptation of the German 88, the 90's on our Pershings, outclassed the T-34 in spades. I think the quantity of T-34s they produced and distributed contributed to their useful life. The Soviets made some crude weapons in great quantities up until the 50's. Since then their science and manufacturing improved significantly.Thankfully that effort and the expenditures supporting it bankrupted them.

But all of that is beside the point. One Nuke delivered in a containership would be nothing to take lightly. Don't poke a starving tiger. Just let it die and go after the threats to our civilization focused around the worlds major sources of oil. As those sources of money dry up for the terrorists the oilwells will become their targets and weapons as Saddam and his supporters have previewed for us in Desert Storm and currently in Iraq. We need to maintain our focus on the immediate war on terror.

Russian spacecraft may "suck", but I'd point out that Russia is currently the only nation capable of reaching the ISS.

The bomb in the containership argument is to the point.

To say that because a system is lousy, everything it attempts is bound to fail makes no sense.

Except that everything the Russians made did fail.

The AK-47 isn't a particularly excellent example of failure. Nor were their submarines, or missiles, or nukes.

As for the norks, it seems odd that so much of their missile technology has made it to the rest of world if it doesn't work.

The norks, on their way to ultimate failure, could do a lot of damage with just one working nuke and a tramp steamer.

Some elements of Russian research were pretty good. They invested more in welding research than anybody else.

I don't know a thing about North Korea's output, though I did talk to a ship captain who took a load of wheat there two years ago. He described it as weird, totally dark.

I'm happy to acknowledge that most of N. Korea's produciton is pretty bad, but you wouldn't want to bet the farm that all of it is.

Why? We paid for all this hardware--let's use it.