The criminals in North Korea are thumping their chest.

North Korea welcomed the new year Saturday with a call for better ties with rival South Korea, warning that war “will bring nothing but a nuclear holocaust.”

Despite calls in its annual New Year’s message for a Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons, the communist North, which has conducted two nuclear tests since 2006, also said its military is ready for “prompt, merciless and annihilatory action” against its enemies.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles relations with the North, said the editorial carried in the official Korean Central News Agency, even with its tough rhetoric, showed the North’s interest in resuming talks with the South.

The annual holiday message is scrutinized by officials and analysts in neighboring countries for policy clues. This year, it received special attention after the North’s Nov. 23 artillery shelling of a South Korean island near the countries’ disputed western sea border, the first attack on a civilian area since the 1950-53 Korean War.

That barrage, which followed an alleged North Korean torpedoing of a South Korean warship in March, sent tensions between the Koreas soaring and fueled fears of war during the last weeks of 2010.

In South Korea, President Lee Myung-bak, dressed in traditional Korean clothes, said in a televised New Year’s address he would work toward peace. “I am confident that we will be able to establish peace on the Korean peninsula and continue sustained economic growth,” he said.

Allow me to weigh in, please.  Horse crap!  Is that clear enough?  Having weaponized Uranium or Plutonium isn’t the same thing as having it in a purity that supports successful nuclear weapons, and having sufficient purity isn’t the same thing as having it miniturized in order to deliver it, and having missiles, even ICBMs, isn’t the same thing as having a successful delivery program for nuclear weapons even if they are miniturized.  North Korea still must develop their program to truly be a threat to the U.S.  They aren’t a problem just yet.

However, given enough South Korean sunshine diplomacy and pretending that the Peninsula will one day unify under a democratic government, or pretending that the North Korean dictators – including the military dictators – want openness, and given enough hand-wringing in the U.S., or conversely, enough chuckling about “that crazy old dictator,” and given enough time, they will be a problem.

They will miniturize their weapons, attain sufficient purity, and test enough weapons delivery systems, that they will be a threat not only to South Korea but the West Coast of the U.S. as well.  So how long will be play their game?  Until it’s too late?

Total war isn’t the answer, but neither is U.S. aid to keep their population from starving.  In the end, just like water, everything seeks its own level, and keeping the regime alive only prolongs the problem and postpones the day of reckoning for North Korea.