Double standards: why North Korea got the bomb.

The government most destabilized by North Korea's nuclear explosion last month was clearly the government of the United States. Washington had said it would prevent this from happening.

The Clinton administration negotiated with an opaque Pyongyang to exchange security assurances and qualified help in peaceful nuclear-power development for a probably unreliable promise not to develop weapons. The Bush administration spurned negotiation, insulted Kim Jong Il, and made empty threats.

North Korea's test is only a first step in what probably will be the eventual failure of the entire nonproliferation effort. That is the prospect so long as the five governments recognized in 1968 as legitimate possessors of nuclear weapons do not honor their Article VI commitments under the nonproliferation treaty (NPT) to reduce and eventually eliminate their own nuclear arsenals. Pyongyang's explosion is a demonstration to Washington that it can't keep and improve its own nuclear forces and expect the NPT to survive.

An international system that allows only the original five nuclear powers (now illegally joined by Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) to possess these arms cannot last. The world is now on its way to a generalization of these weapons to any country that considers itself at risk from an existing nuclear state.

The promise of the five to renounce the nuclear weapon eventually was never convincing. Since then, the evidence is that none will do so. Certainly the United States will not. This destroys the utility and relevance of the treaty. North Korea even went to the trouble of formally withdrawing from the treaty in January 2003, after the Bush administration denounced Pyongyang.

The North Korean test and Iran's supposed (if unconfirmed) intention to acquire nuclear weapons are reactions to what is seen as the threat of American intervention--to bring about "regime change." The only value of a nuclear weapon to a small (or relatively weak) country is to deter attack or intrusion or interference by a more powerful country.

Nuclear weapons may not even be entirely convincing in that role, because their destructive power is disproportionate to their actual utility. They are a source of unpredictability, and hence of deterrence through uncertainty. They are also an invitation to extinction, if the enemy is sufficiently ruthless. The aggressor has to ask whether its victim can really afford a nuclear response to an invasion or other attack, because of the risk of massive retaliation.

On the other hand, even the more powerful attacker would pause at the threat that a nuclear reaction by its victim might cause a degree of casualties and damage that its own people (or even its own military forces) would find unacceptable. It must also consider international opinion. In the North Korean case, suppose that even a conventional U.S. attack were followed by a Hiroshima-scale retaliation against Seoul (not only South Korea's capital but the headquarters of U.S. forces in the country). Who would have gained what?

Bernard Brodie, Alfred Wohlstetter, my former colleague Herman Kahn, and other intelligent people spent the 1950s and 1960s trying to think of clever ways to use nuclear weapons to advance national objectives, with no great success. If the enemy possesses nuclear weapons, no matter how ingenious the offensive tactics employed, the risk of failure or of overwhelming retaliation is usually unacceptably high. We may be thankful that the usefulness of nuclear weapons nearly always comes down to deterrence, certainly so for countries like North Korea or Iran. But that is all they want from them.

The Americans and Israelis calling for war with Iran talk about Iranian nuclear aggression, nuclear blackmail, or bestowing nuclear weapons on terrorists. None of this is serious. You don't attack or blackmail other states unless you have what the nuclear planner calls an assured second-strike capability. That is, you have to be able to guarantee that even if your victim strikes back, you can still inflict unacceptable damage on him in retaliation; hence that it is not worthwhile for him to respond. Neither Iran nor North Korea is going to be able to do that for a very long time. They would need hardened missile silos or submarines at sea--the panoply of the cold war.

As for giving nuclear weapons to terrorists: since missiles and explosions can be traced to their manufacturers, no matter who pulls the trigger, that would not be a prudent course of action. The world has undoubtedly been lucky to limit the spread of nuclear weapons to the extent that it has since 1945. The nonproliferation treaty was a good idea, but the major powers did not sign it in good faith and have not lived up to it.

The threats offered by the major powers against "rogue states"--or against any state lacking conventional defenses--is an irresistible invitation to proliferation. The one good thing that can be said about the situation in which we now find ourselves is that the Japanese and Chinese governments are going to be even more careful, and more cooperative, than they have been in the past.

[c] 2006 by Tribune Media Services