We have allowed this to happen

The odds that we will wake up one morning to discover that Chicago, or New York, or London have disappeared overnight have shortened considerably. We would do well to concentrate our minds on how it came to this. Monday's apparently successful nuclear test by the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-Il does not, as claimed, mark the dawn of a new age of nuclear proliferation. The North Koreans had already boasted of having developed a nuclear weapon, and no one has ever doubted, whatever the truth of these claims, that they would in time. North Korean scientists have already been sharing their technological secrets with their Iranian counterparts, as earlier Pakistan had helped them. Nuclear proliferation is already here, and will accelerate. The current crisis is only a signpost along the road to inevitability. Its worst effect, rather, will be to confirm what might until now not have been apparent: that we -- the world, the West, the United States -- are simply unable to come to terms with the threat that now confronts us. The world's worst dictators, it is now clear, may acquire the world's most destructive weapons with impunity -- even as a new breed of macro-terrorists advertise themselves as potential after-market customers. Either we do not recognize this for the existential threat that it is, or we cannot summon the nerve, collectively or individually, to take the steps required to save ourselves. Hardly had the lady on the North Korean news finished announcing the country's latest "great leap forward" before denial began to set in. I had wondered how long it would take for someone to blame this on George W. Bush: it turned out to be instantaneous. North Korea had been provoked into acquiring nuclear weapons, it was argued, by the U.S. administration's bellicose posture. The invasion of Iraq had only confirmed the North Korean government in its belief that it was next on the regime change hit list, while Mr. Bush's unwillingness to negotiate with them directly offered little alternative but confrontation. Well of course it did, unless you recall that the North Korean nuclear program has been in the works for at least 30 years; that it first pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty more than a decade ago; that in exchange for a North Korean pledge to freeze work on the project, the U.S. promised, in the infamous 1994 "Agreed Framework," to supply the regime with fuel oil, even to help it build two nuclear reactors, only to be told in 2002 that the North Koreans had never lived up to their side of the bargain; that notwithstanding this admission, the Bush administration had agreed to further talks, this time involving North Korea's neighbours, at which North Korea again promised to dismantle its nuclear programs if still further concessions were made, and again reneged. The U.S. position only looks hawkish compared to, say, the South Koreans, who have for many years sought to pacify their northern neighbours with trade links and high-level exchanges -- an approach known as the "sunshine policy" -- or the Chinese, North Korea's historic allies, who have kept the country supplied with food and other essentials and thus saved it from utter collapse. There was some talk in the past couple of days that these countries would now take a tougher line with the Kim regime. Fat chance. As far as the Chinese are concerned, North Korea does not have the bomb: it is the bomb, a humanitarian catastrophe waiting to go off. Let Kim fall, and millions of North Korean refugees, hitherto content to starve within the Hermit Kingdom's borders, would flood into China. So there will be no regime change, if China can help it: no blockade, no inspection of outbound ships for weapons-making materials, not even meaningful sanctions. Who does that leave? The United Nations? Expect a lot of talk in coming days and weeks to the effect that this is a "vital test of the UN's credibility." That would be, by my count, the seventh such test the UN has undergone in recent years, all of which it has failed with flying colours: Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq (17 times!), with Iran the next in line. Each time, the UN is warned it risks "going the way of the League of Nations" -- you know, after it failed to prevent Mussolini's annexation of Abyssinia. Huh? It's been one long League of Nations since the start, an endless series of Abyssinias. So the Security Council will meet, it will "recognize" this and "deplore" that, but no one believes it will do much else. Mr. Bush, for his part, will declare North Korea's latest outrage "unacceptable," drawing a new line in the sand after all the rest have been crossed -- he now says any "transfer" of North Korean weaponry would be regarded as a "grave threat" -- but even those who denounce him as a bully and a warmonger no longer think he's up to it. We simply do not have the stomach for this fight. We will learn no lessons from this latest crisis, as we have learned none from those before. But be assured our adversaries will. In Iran, they are watching and learning from North Korea's example, as North Korea had learned from Iran's, each discovering in its turn that there are no checks on its ambitions, nor any world to stop it. And when, as the wisest heads advise, we abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban, and Iraq to al-Qaeda, the nuclear bazaar really will be open. Still, I don't want to leave you with the impression that all is dark. It could be worse. Just imagine if Saddam Hussein was still in power.