Quick, Call The French, Call Kofi Annan! What Should We Do Gerhardt?

Inspectors have established that North Korea sold Libya two tons of uranium to Libya. It's likely that North Korea has provided nuclear weapons fuel to others as well. North Korea is estimated to have 4 million tons of high quality, highly exploitable uranium. That enough for two million uranium based warheads.

At a moment when the Bush administration is focused on Iraq, the fresh intelligence on North Korea poses another challenge to the United States.

The classified evidence — many details of which are still sketchy — has touched off a race among the world's intelligence services to explore whether North Korea has made similar clandestine sales to other nations or perhaps even to terror groups seeking atomic weapons.

"The North Koreans have been selling missiles for years to many countries," one senior Bush administration official said recently, referring to the country's well-known sales to Iran, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and other nations. "Now, we have to look at their trading network in a very different context, to see if something much worse was happening as well."

Nuance will not solve this.

And, once again, Clinton-era intelligence agency dismemberment seems to be costing us again.

[T]he emerging story of the North Korean sales also reveals another intelligence lapse: Though American satellites monitor North Korea more carefully than almost any nation, intelligence officials apparently failed to detect the uranium shipments.

As recently as March, when the Bush administration invited reporters to a secure Y-12 nuclear facility in Tennessee to view the nuclear hardware turned over by Libya, a senior administration official said that Libya's uranium had likely come from Pakistan. American officials say they are now backing away from that statement, while they seek to verify the new evidence.

As the I.A.E.A. continues its investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Energy Department and the State Department's intelligence unit are engaged in what one official called "two or three separate reviews" of the American assessment of the size of North Korea's nuclear arsenal.