THE BIRTH announcement of each new arrival into the nuclear family in the past 50 years has been greeted by existing members with loud condemnations and dark prognostications.

When China successfully detonated an atomic weapon in 1964, the doomsday clock jumped forward several minutes as the world contemplated the threatening triangular possibilities of the clumsy US-Soviet-Chinese ballistic ballet in the middle of the Cold War. Israel’s presumed nuclear status in the 1980s was deemed to have accelerated the efforts of Arab states to win an arms race in the most volatile region in the world. When India and Pakistan took the leap in quick succession in the 1990s, they seemed to underline the knife-edge instability of the post-Cold War era.

But somehow, sooner or later, the world adjusted to the new reality; China, Israel, India and Pakistan have all, in different ways, come in from the cold. Despite the apocalyptic predictions, the world has moved on and the single wartime use of nuclear weapons, over Japan in 1945, recedes further into ancient history.

So you could be forgiven for thinking that the hoo-hah this week over North Korea’s joyful announcement that it had become the tenth family member might have been overdone. Won’t we just get used to dealing with Kim Jong Il as well? The optimistic view — if it can be called that — is enhanced by the suspicion that what they did in the mountains near Kimchaek last weekend may have been unsettling for the people of Kimchaek but shouldn’t make the rest of us lose much sleep.

Stripped of the grandiose claims by Kim’s minions, the objective scientific evidence for a nuclear explosion is sketchy. The explosive yield, according to military analysts, was something less than a kiloton. A plutonium device such as that first used by the US in 1945 produces a yield in the range of 20 kilotons. Some warheads in the US nuclear arsenal now can deliver an impact about 1,000 times that of Hiroshima. Remember too that in July, the Koreans launched an “ intercontinental” ballistic missile that fell into the sea about a minute into its flight and you have a sense of the truly exiguous scale of the country’s capabilities. If the Soviet Union was memorably nicknamed Upper Volta with Rockets, it’s probably fair to think of North Korea as Togo with a Chemistry Set. So why worry? Here’s why. Unlike all previous nuclear nativities, North Korea’s efforts this week have truly propelled the world into a new and much more dangerous age. There’s no good strategic reason for Pyongyang even to claim to have a nuclear weapon, as China, Israel, Pakistan and India had.

It will be the first nuclear power to be headed by a crazed monomaniac who boasts of his commercial interest in shipping nuclear weapons to terrorist groups. The sheer unpredictability of North Korea terrifies everyone in its neighbourhood in a way that none of those other countries ever did. Its actions this week will almost certainly escalate into a nuclear arms race.

In the process this accelerated proliferation will prompt the most important change in US military posture since the advent of the Bomb. A senior administration official told me this week that with nuclear powers in North East Asia and, heaven forbid, in Iran, the nuclear threshold on which the US has operated for the past 50 years will be lowered. Confronted with the growing probability of nuclear attack, the US will reorient its own military nuclear capabilities towards a more tactical stance. The currently sky-high threshold for a US nuclear attack will be lowered sharply to take account of the new threats. That in itself will prompt a beggar-my-neighbour downward global shift in the conditions under which the bomb might be used and an upward shift in the probability of nuclear strikes.

How did we get into this scary state? Of course the world’s pundits are sure it is all America’s fault. The US has failed to be sufficiently engaged. The refusal to talk directly to Pyongyang and to focus all its efforts on Iraq have allowed North Korea to cruise unmolested to nuclear status.

This is, essentially, drivel. The problem with North Korea has not been an insufficiency of multilateralist diplomacy in the past ten years but an overabundance. Beginning in 1994, the Clinton Administration started the US down a course of an engagement with Pyongyang that was all carrots and no sticks. Every time the North Koreans thumbed their noses at the US and its allies, they were punished with — what? Sharp intakes of breath and shakes of the head.

Not only was the US unwilling to make good on its threats, but effective multilateral action also required serious efforts by other countries with real leverage over North Korea to do something. But for the past six years China has been playing a dangerous double game. It never wanted North Korea to become a nuclear power but it was quite happy that its ally kept the US, Japan and South Korea off balance with its burgeoning ambitions.

The same story of hand-wringing futility has been played out with Iran. Russia and China have both placed short-term diplomatic and commercial gain over long-term stability. The Europeans were, well, European.

As for Iraq, I don’t recall the Russians, Chinese or Europeans urging the US to divert its regime-changing attentions to North Korea. They wanted the US to perform the same foot-dragging, futile, pointless dance with Baghdad that they were pursuing over Pyongyang. Would that have been any better? Now, belatedly, the talk is of tough UN sanctions against Iran and North Korea. But it is too late. Out of a combination of fear, opportunism and cynicism, the world’s so-called powers have ridden a tiger for the past decade. Now the tiger has turned on them. Blaming America may make them feel better about it. It won’t change the bleak and terrifying new reality.

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