The Australian Prime Minister has said "The leaders of North Korea are facing a fateful choice. They can continue the tentative steps they have made towards constructive engagement with the world, towards a peaceful solution on a Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons, and towards a brighter future for its people. Or they can choose the perilous path of confrontation and nuclear blackmail, sustaining their impoverished state through trafficking drugs and weapons, and further deepening their isolation."

It is an evil world. North Korea is a regime that is comprehensively an anachronism has paradoxically become an inescapable portent of a bloody future. North Korea poses a threat. The CIA believe that North Korea is developing the ability to miniaturise its nuclear weapons so it could put them on missiles. Previously, it was thought that North Korea possessed at most three crude nuclear devices, which were too big and clumsy to be put on missiles. If these were ever to be used, they would need to be dropped from aeroplanes. If the North Koreans developed the technology to put nuclear weapons on missiles, they would be able to threaten all of Japan with nuclear devastation. The CIA also believes the North Koreans have developed a site at Youngdoktong for testing explosives that would detonate the miniaturised devices. While the North Koreans are working on ballistic missiles that could reach the US and northern Australia, they already have missiles that can reliably reach Japan. Meanwhile, they possess, in 8000 spent nuclear fuel rods, enough plutonium for another half-dozen nuclear weapons. They have restarted the reactor at Yongbyon, which will also provide new weapons grade plutonium, and they have a uranium enrichment program, which will also produce weapons material, using small centrifuges that are hard to detect. North Korea has captured a single essential truth about the future, that governing regimes will be more secure, no matter how monstrous they are in other respects, if they possess nuclear weapons.

What can we possibly do? What are the alternatives? The US and its allies really only have three basic options on North Korea.
ƒ{ The first is the traditional one ¡V reward Pyongyang for its nuclear delinquency, bribe it into abandoning its nuclear ambitions. It is still the preferred option of every policy maker in Washington and Canberra. The problem is North Korea took the bribes but kept building the weapons anyway.
ƒ{ The second choice is a pre-emptive military strike on North Korea's nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. The Pentagon has examined and re-examined this very seriously. The problem is Pyongyang's power of retaliation, which resides not so much in its nuclear weapons, but in its artillery. This is nestled into the hills just north of the border with South Korea. War on the Korean Peninsula would be catastrophic.
ƒ{ The third policy choice for the US and its allies in the end is to do nothing: to huff and puff diplomatically but simply learn to live with a nuclear North Korea.
This is the most likely outcome. Ponder what it really means. No one can know for sure how much nuclear capacity Pyongyang really has. As well as its reactor at Yongbyon, and the 8000 spent fuel rods with all their plutonium, it also has a uranium enrichment program. And, of course, it is developing ever-longer range missiles. So much destructive capacity in such a dangerous and at times mad regime is profoundly disturbing in its own right, but much worse is the implication for proliferation. North Korea makes $US1 billion to $2 billion ($1.5 billion to $3 billion) a year smuggling missiles, weapons of mass destruction technology and drugs. This is its main source of hard currency.

Eventually, if it is producing a lot of plutonium, Pyongyang will sell some of it. There is not an intelligence analyst in the world who does not believe Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and, with its extensive nuclear power industry, is already far advanced towards their production. Libya and Syria are almost inevitable customers. Though it is mere common sense to try to interdict North Korean shipments of WMD materials, plutonium could be easily transferred in planes. Proliferation will be impossible to stop.

If North Korea survives this testing period and becomes an established nuclear weapons state the pressure on Japan and South Korea to follow suit would be overwhelming. Eventually, over perhaps a decade or two, the world will be transformed into one in which most big states have nuclear weapons. Trying to prevent leakage of weapons to terrorists then would be Sisyphean.

Outside factors might save us in North Korea. The regime might collapse. China might prevail on Pyongyang not to go all the way in nuclear matters. But China's interests are not quite ours. It does not want Japan and South Korea to go nuclear in reaction to Pyongyang doing so, but this could be achieved either by getting North Korea to give up its nuclear program or simply by recreating a Clintonian fudge, with Pyongyang taking the bribes but keeping its program going clandestinely.