Talk about playing for keeps . . .

If they'll do this  . . .

Just how badly did Kim Jong-un want to kill his older half-brother? So badly, Malaysia police now say, that he was willing to kill a whole lot more people in a busy international airport to get it done. Authorities now have to decontaminate their main airport in Kuala Lampur after the toxicology on Kim Jong-nam’s body indicated that assassins used the deadly — and generally banned — nerve agent VX to kill him nearly two weeks ago . . . 

This wasn't a BB gun attack.

It’s one of the deadliest poisons known to man, if not the deadliest. It is considered a weapon of mass destruction, and its manufacture is outlawed by the Chemical Weapons Convention — a treaty that North Korea has never signed. Pyongyang insists it has no chemical weapons, but this pretty clearly shows they do. Estimates of their stockpiles run into the thousands of tons, including VX, and it didn’t take much to pull off this assassination. Seoul believes the rest of it might be intended to put in missiles to rain down on their heads if the war starts up again.

So how did the assassins escape its ill effects? According to the police chief, one of them didn’t; she began vomiting at some point, either in custody or before her capture. VX has an antidote too, an injectable that US troops carry on the battlefield when the threat of chemical warfare exists, and it’s possible that the two assassins took the antidote at the same time they put the agent on their hands or immediately afterward. 

This is quickly moving to the fore among threats to basic world order.