LOS ANGELES -- Today's level of anxiety and near-panic in the U.S. news media is amazing. It is almost as if America's leading journalists are thrilled to be writing about something other than Iraq finally. Thank you, Kim Jong Il -- we were all getting rather bored.
And more shocks may be coming, and they may not be far into the future. Should we anticipate nuclear weapons tests by North Korea becoming commonplace? Why not? Having crossed the threshold, there may not be any turning back.
Get a grip, though: Nuclear powers do not necessarily launch nuclear wars. None of the nation-states possessing such arsenals have yet used any, except the United States. And its weapons -- two of them -- were ironically used against an Asian nonnuclear power. This was in 1945, in Asia -- against the Japanese. The North Koreans know this.