Remember North Korea?

The fun-loving kids in North Korea, flushed with success from their missile tests last month, appear to be preparing for a test of a nuclear weapon:

There is new evidence that North Korea may be preparing for an underground test of a nuclear bomb, U.S. officials told ABC News.

“It is the view of the intelligence community that a test is a real possibility,” said a senior State Department official.

A senior military official told ABC News that a U.S. intelligence agency has recently observed “suspicious vehicle movement” at a suspected North Korean test site.

The activity includes the unloading of large reels of cable outside P’unggye-yok, an underground facility in northeast North Korea. Cables can be used in nuclear testing to connect an underground test site to outside observation equipment. The intelligence was brought to the attention of the White House last week.

Even before this most recent intelligence, there has been growing concern within the U.S. government that North Korea has been moving toward a nuclear test. North Korea is believed to have enough nuclear material to build as many as a dozen nuclear bombs, but it has never tested one. A successful test would remove any doubt that North Korea is a nuclear power.

QandO Blog is soliciting suggestions for dealing with the situation. As I’ve maintained for years any real solution of the problems that North Korea presents requires the active participation of China, the North Korean state’s primary patron and, in the final analysis, their sole reason for existence. As we saw last month China can be motivated to take a tougher line with the North Koreans. Make sure that a North Korean nuclear test is an embarrassment to the Chinese.

Japan has first-rate technological ability, economic resources, military (although they call it a police force), and lots of material. I doubt they’ll be amused by North Korean nuclear tests. Sounds like an East Asian arms race in the making to me.

IMO a nuclear-armed North Korea highlights the problem with unstable states getting nuclear weapons. Do you prop up genuinely reprehensible regimes to ensure that their nuclear weapons don’t fall into even worse hands? Or do you encourage these regimes to fail in the hope that their nuclear weapons won’t fall into even worse hands in the chaos that follows?