KIM JONG IL has squandered the wild card that has kept the world at bay: fear of the damage that this utterly ruthless and unpredictable tyrant could inflict if his grip on power began to disintegrate.

By turning nuclear threat into nuclear reality, he has stood the instability equation on its head. He has so badly upset the Asian applecart by this action that, not only to the US and Japan, but crucially also to North Korea’s Chinese and South Korean neighbours, it has begun to look even more dangerous to leave the Dear Leader in place than to start trying to engineer his fall. The more he now raises the stakes — by further tests and missile launches, even through “war threats” aimed at unnerving South Korea — the weaker will be the arguments for keeping Kim on life-support, rather than pulling the plug. Once the worst-case scenario has materialised, policies based on averting it pass their sell-by date.

This is not to say that either China or South Korea, the two countries most strongly associated with “engaging” Pyongyang, has any interest in “regime change”. On the contrary: for dissimilar reasons, that is something both are anxious to avoid.

Some years ago one of South Korea’s best-informed analysts of the North Korean threat explained Seoul’s “sunshine policy” to me like this. “It is our storm umbrella. We have looked carefully at German unification. West Germany is far richer than we are, and the East Germans were almost westerners already, and yet the costs and the cultural strains have been a terrible drain. For us to absorb the North, bankrupt and horribly brainwashed, would be a shock so great that it could imperil our survival as a democracy. So we send food to our hungry brothers knowing that most of it is stolen by the military, and give aid that releases money to the nuclear programme, because we need to prevent not only violent collapse, but even the quiet death we don’t expect. We don’t really hope that ‘engagement’ will tear down the prison walls, because Kim knows that reforms would destroy him. We don’t, frankly, even want the prison gates to open, not yet, because we are afraid that we could not cope.”

China’s friendship with its old revolutionary ally has cooled considerably since its “volunteers” poured across the border in the Korean War. From being “closer than lips and teeth”, the relationship is now more of gritted Chinese teeth as they struggle with Kim’s intractability, both in refusing to risk economic reforms that would lessen his wretched country’s dependence on Chinese oil and food, and in his defiance of Beijing’s repeated warnings against going nuclear. China’s irritation has until now been trumped by its determination to avert internal Korean turmoil that could send millions fleeing across the two countries’ 1,416km border, risk war on the Korean peninsula and end with the intolerable reappearance of US forces at the Yalu River border. It has counselled patience to the US, advised everyone against taking the North Korean nuclear threat too seriously, argued endlessly, privately and fruitlessly with Pyongyang — and has been rewarded with a faceful of radioactive red paint.

Worst of all, both for China and South Korea, there are indications that Kim’s nuclear gamble was driven primarily by the need to suppress dissent in the country’s tiny pampered elite, not least among the all-powerful North Korean military. Even the Chinese are incapable of penetrating the obsessively secretive entourage of the Dear Leader, in a system so overwhelmingly concentrated on his personality cult that even to talk of a military command structure would be to give a misleading impression of ordered hierarchy. Public dissent is impossible, and private disputes are, even for the powerful, one-way passes to labour camps. But there are unmistakable if necessarily sketchy indications of chronic and worsening tensions within the regime.

Beijing is undoubtedly aware of a recent note circulated to senior Workers’ Party cadres, reporting the theft of several thousand weapons from military depots and, linked to these thefts, the murder of 200 high-ranking officers by attackers who dispersed before they could be captured. High-ranking party members no longer go out late at night and have asked for camouflaged guards to ward off attacks.

In the ranks of North Korea’s 1.2 million-strong military, indiscipline bred of deprivation and hunger is spreading despite Kim’s vaunted “military first” policy. Soldiers raid food stores and sell surplus rations to even hungrier civilians. There is rampant smuggling of military equipment and fuel across the supposedly closely policed border with China. Patrol boats have been stranded at sea because sailors had pumped out the fuel tanks and filled them up with water. Factory managers and the secret police are into similar rackets, stripping factories idled for want of fuel and raw materials.

It is imperative for discipline within the terror apparatus to hold, because thousands of Koreans have begun to leave their villages, risking imprisonment or worse in an increasingly desperate hunt for food; shortages exacerbated by last July’s floods could mean the death of a further 100,000 this winter from starvation. But Division 39, the personal business empire that Kim spends on life’s little luxuries for the favoured few, brings in a lot less bacon since the US, quietly assisted by China, began closing in on foreign financial institutions suspected of laundering the proceeds of North Korea’s trade in amphetamines and forged US and Chinese currency. Even the tautest totalitarian state needs cash to keep key cadres, secret police and military commanders loyal. For China, the arguments for squeezing Kim out before rumbling becomes revolt are thus becoming stronger by the day.

Beijing has been cultivating “interesting” generals under the cloak of prolonged military exchanges; and might even use the Dear Leader’s eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, who is in Beijing, having fallen out with his father, as a pawn in a “continuity” strategy to replace Kim with more pragmatic and pliable allies.

Willows bend, but stiff trees break in a storm; China is unlikely to attempt this extremely difficult trick until the crisis worsens. For now, Beijing and Seoul will hide behind the Security Council, and probably try to slow the pace at which the international tourniquet is tightened. But South Koreans have had enough of sunshine. In the North, Kim’s nuclear trick will placate the military for now and kindle pride for a time. But he cannot escape North Korea’s nuclear winter.

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