Bring On Your Nukes, N. Korea, We Have Tarps and Duct Tape

It was a day of unpleasant surprises, and it began with the news that North Korea is capable of lobbing a nuclear bomb at California.

“Yes, they could do that,” CIA Director George J. Tenet told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday.

If that’s true, we’re sitting ducks here in the Golden State.

My guess is that North Korea would never do such a thing because it would be instantly pulverized in response. But these are strange days, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il doesn’t strike me as the most stable person in the world.

And here’s the thing:

If he gets an itch one day, or if the smooth-talking President Bush ticks him off by calling him a pygmy again, Kim isn’t going to aim that nuke at rural Nevada. He’s going to be gunning for San Francisco or, even more likely, Los Angeles.

Apparently I’m not the only one who sees it like that. Julie Davis, who handles the phones at the Home Depot on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, told me there’s been a run on duct tape. New York and Washington have nothing on us.

Residents of the Eastern Seaboard have been madly stocking up on water and other bunker supplies, including duct tape, which they seem to believe -- despite the existence of science -- will seal out toxic contamination or keep window glass from going airborne in case of an explosion.

Paging Dr. Strangelove.

Bush sends our troops off to the Persian Gulf with the best firepower tax dollars can buy, and we’re left uncovered on the West Coast, defending ourselves against nuclear attack with rolls of duct tape.

Is this California’s punishment for voting for Al Gore?

Some experts have downplayed the threat, saying North Korea’s weapons capabilities aren’t that sophisticated. “If they aimed for the United States,” one observer told The Times, “they might hit South America.”

This is supposed to make us sleep easier? It’s like being in the sights of a drunk gun nut, except that one pull of the trigger can kill tens of thousands.

But as I said at the top, I got more than one surprise on Wednesday. The second came when I called foreign policy experts to talk about the big news that North Korea might be able to drop the big one on the western United States.

It isn’t news, they said.

What’s that you say?

That’s been known by U.S. intelligence people for a couple of years, they told me.

Then why in God’s name was Iraq the priority and not North Korea?

Good question, said Rajan Menon, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The situation is much dicier in North Korea than in Iraq,” Menon said. “The Iraqis don’t have, and will not in the foreseeable future have, the capacity to launch a missile that can threaten the U.S. homeland.”

Menon said we ought to be trying to talk North Korea into scaling back its arms program in return for economic assistance. If they keep making bombs, he said, South Korea and Japan might drop their no-nukes policy, and it won’t take much to trigger a war.

“America has 37,000 troops in South Korea who could be immediately swept into it,” Menon said. “Hundreds of thousands of people could be killed, and it could immediately go nuclear.”

So why did we send 200,000 troops to Iraq?

Oh yeah. Because Saddam might funnel arms to terrorists.

But guess what. There’s nothing to keep North Korea’s Kim from doing the same with even deadlier weapons, particularly since President Bush has mouthed off about him to the entire world.

“The North Koreans are so desperate for cash, they’d sell their mother and throw in their sister as well,” said USC professor Richard Dekmejian. “And their anger and defiance toward the U.S. is so great -- because they see themselves as the next target -- that they might do it out of spite.”

Menon agreed that North Korea “could become a shopping mall for every rogue state that has the cash and wants nuclear capability.”

In the absence of artful diplomacy and logical foreign policy, the duct tape is beginning to make more sense.

“We’re selling a lot of plastic sheeting too,” Julie Davis of Home Depot told me.

It’s another way to keep shattered glass from spraying.

“But we still have plenty of duct tape.”

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com