South Korean President Lee Myung-bak (C) listens to Defence Minister Kim Tae-young (3rd R) during the urgent security conference at the presidential Blue House in Seoul November 23, 2010. Lee, who has pursued a hard line with the reclusive North since taking office nearly three years ago, said a response had to be firm following the attack on Yeonpyeong island, just 120 km west of the capital Seoul.Handout/Reuters
North Korea, where a little-known, 20-something will soon have his finger on the nuclear trigger and is already strutting his stuff with an indiscriminate artillery barrage, serves as the latest grim reminder of the failure of nuclear nonproliferation.
Three presidents - Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama - over nearly 20 years have variously threatened, pleaded, paid, cajoled and occasionally warned that war was an option, all to no avail. The neo-Stalinist regime in Pyongyang, covertly in league with Pakistan's nuclear mastermind and Iran, has managed to build a rudimentary nuclear-weapons capacity and feed the netherworld of nuclear aspirants.
"North Korea is such a bizarre case that it's always difficult to draw lessons learned," says Ivan Oelrich, senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, the group founded by the scientists who created the first nuclear weapons and is devoted to averting nuclear conflict.
Mr. Obama, who condemned Pyongyang's recklessness Tuesday, has largely ignored North Korea's de facto nuclear arsenal, treating it as a geopolitical fact he inherited from the Bush and Clinton failures to thwart a rogue state from joining the ranks of the nuclear-armed. But Iran, to which Mr. Obama initially extended an olive branch, may emerge as the defining foreign-policy issue of his presidency.
Having failed to keep North Korea from building a bomb, the U.S.-led non-proliferation focus has shifted to Tehran, where an Islamic theocracy has spent hundreds of billions on secret, dispersed, often-underground and hardened sites to create a sophisticated nuclear program.
"The evil [world]powers are too insignificant and therefore could do nothing to stop Iran's progress," Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday.
For decades, the big powers have tried, and failed, to keep rogue states and regional actors from secretly building nuclear arsenals, usually under the guise of power generation.
Only five nations - Britain, China, France, the United States and Russia - the victorious Second World War allies who appointed themselves as the only legal possessors of nuclear weapons, are supposed to have them.
But the actual list is far longer; starting with India, which used Canadian-supplied technology to build its first atomic bomb, followed by Israel, Pakistan and North Korea.
"The old, nonproliferation regime just didn't work," said Anthony Seaboyer, head of the Proliferation and Security Research Unit at Queen's University in Kingston.
Along the way, a handful of states have tried and either failed or quit. South Africa's formerly racist regime scrapped its nuclear weapons program rather than hand it over to the belatedly enfranchised blacks who succeeded it. Brazil apparently abandoned its military program. Iraq abandoned its nuclear program, twice - the first time after Israel bombed its reactor in 1982 and the second time, after harsh and punitive sanctions were imposed in the wake of the 1991 war.
But only Libya, burdened by sanctions, and apparently unwillingness to risk Mr. Bush's wrath in the wake of the "shock and awe" invasions of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, has openly given up a nuclear military program when faced with a combination of sticks and carrots.
In the modern era, there's no "real political will to make nonproliferation a priority," Dr. Seaboyer said.
There are few options, let alone good ones, in dealing with Tehran.
Unlike some U.S. hawks and the Israeli government, the notion of a pre-emptive strike to destroy Iran's nuclear sites holds little promise for most analysts.
"How will the world be able to stop Iran if it can't stop North Korea," Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said yesterday. "North Korea is part of an axis of evil together with Iran and Syria whose close co-operation includes nuclear distribution, missile and combat capabilities."
The Obama administration has managed to keep both Russia and China engaged to the extent that a third round of sanctions has been imposed on Iran for its ongoing defiance of international nuclear safeguards and inspections.
But the scarcity of American options was starkly evident Tuesday when Mr. Obama, according to his spokesman Bill Burton, said he was "outraged by these actions." However, Washington wasn't willing to denounce North Korea's unprovoked artillery barrage as a truce violation.
A similarly short list of options constrains police vis-à-vis Tehran. "There isn't really a military option," Dr. Seaboyer said, "at least not unless you could put ground troops in to check and verify that all the sites were destroyed."
But Dr. Seaboyer said there was a slight chance that Iran might be swayed by a combination of sanctions, pressure and rewards.
Mr. Oelrich was even more hopeful. He said "we still have time when dealing with Tehran; it's not weeks nor months but years," before Iran will be in a position to explode a nuclear device.
More importantly, he said it was not yet clear that the Iranian regime had made its decision about whether to pursue a nuclear weapons program. He believes Tehran is still keeping its options open which provides a window for a combination of international pressures and rewards to avert yet another unwanted member of the nuclear-weapons club.