Paul Koring
Three generations of vicious repressive dictators ruling North Korea have consistently cheated and lied while steadily amassing nuclear weapons, creating the world's most dangerous rogue regime.
And three successive U.S. presidents have utterly failed – despite decades of threats, promises, pacts, sanctions and special envoys bearing gifts – to remove or even reduce the catastrophic threat posed by Pyongyang.
Both laughable and terrifying, the thirty-something Kim Jong-un has his pudgy finger on a nuclear trigger at the pivot point where the planet's three most powerfully militarized adversaries, Russia, China and the United States, jostle for advantage.
Pyongyang's bellicose boasting can be discounted. "Our revolutionary force is ready to respond to any kind of war the American imperialists want," Mr. Kim said last year. So too can evidently exaggerated claims, like the clearly doctored photograph of a grinning Mr. Kim watching a submarine-launched missile purportedly capable of lofting a nuclear warhead across the Pacific.
But the stark reality remains that North Korea has steadily amassed a nuclear-weapons arsenal, now numbering in the dozens, and has demonstrated missiles that can put small satellites space.
Harnessed together, those two technologies will soon – if not already – give the unpredictable and murderous Mr. Kim the weapon to reduce a far distant city to a smoking ruin just as primitive atomic bombs dropped from U.S. aircraft 70 years ago wiped out Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Wednesday's claim that North Korean nuclear scientists had mastered and tested a vastly more powerful hydrogen fusion bomb was likely overblown, just as Pyongyang exaggerated its initial small nuclear test 10 years ago.
Still, hoping that Mr. Kim is just bluffing about his avowed willingness to unleash a nuclear attack requires a presumption that the isolated North Korean dictator makes policy decisions based on a rational assessment of outcomes.
Which may be a stretch.
Enraged after his defence minister reportedly fell asleep in a meeting, Mr. Kim ordered his execution, using a powerful anti-aircraft cannon to publicly obliterate him.
Earlier he had one of his uncles and, reportedly, a former mistress similarly executed.
Violent impulsiveness in an absolute ruler with a nuclear arsenal makes North Korea by far the world's most dangerous rogue state.
It also exposes decades of big power failure.
Two decades ago, then-president Bill Clinton crowed that "North Korea will freeze, then dismantle its nuclear program" making "the entire world safer." In 1994, the U.S. and North Korea signed an Agreed Framework aimed at normalizing relations. Mr. Clinton called the deal "good for the United States, good for our allies, and good for the safety of the entire world [because] it reduces the danger of the threat of nuclear spreading in the region."
Except it didn't and the threat became a reality.
North Korea reneged and, clandestinely, resumed its nuclear-weapons program.
By the time George W. Bush reached the Oval Office in 2000, a U.S. defence intelligence assessment concluded Pyongyang would "most likely" have an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking a U.S. West Coast city with a 200-kilogram nuclear warhead by 2015.
In his 2002 State of the Union, Mr. Bush accused Pyongyang of "arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens." Together with Iran and Iraq, North Korea was the third member of the "axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."
Mr. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq a year later and toppled Saddam Hussein, only to discover that Baghdad had long abandoned its nuclear-weapons program.
Meanwhile in North Korea, nuclear engineers were amassing weapons-grade uranium and plutonium.
On Oct. 9, 2006, the earth shook near the village of Punggye-ri as a small one-kiloton atomic device was detonated in a cave. North Korea had defied the world to join the rogue nuclear-weapons club, along with Israel, Pakistan and India who had all secretly opted to develop nuclear weapons outside of the five powers legally permitted to be nuclear armed: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.
A year later, Israeli warplanes attacked and destroyed a nuclear reactor site in Syria built with North Korean assistance, indicating that not only was North Korea developing its own arsenal but it was actively proliferating nuclear-weapons technology to other pariah states.
While Mr. Bush focused on Iraq's non-existent nuclear threat during his two terms as president, Barack Obama has spent his preoccupied with Iran's potential for a nuclear-weapons program.
Mr. Obama largely ignored North Korea's growing nuclear arsenal and its ambitious missile program, focusing instead on a pact with Tehran to curb its nuclear program. In dealing with Iran, all five permanent members of the Security Council have been allied. Whether the pact, completed last year, will prove verifiable and enduring remains to be seen but it stands in sharp contrast to the failure of the big powers – and particularly the United States – to contain North Korea.
The much-vaunted pivot to the Pacific hasn't included any significant new U.S. effort to slow Pyongyang's march to a fully developed nuclear-weapons arsenal capable of first-strike attack on enemies as close as Seoul and as far away as San Francisco.
Alone among the world's nations with nuclear weapons, almost nothing is known about safeguards, if any, and whether North Korea actually has mounted warheads on massive mobile missile launchers that paraded through Pyongyang last year.
"Over the past two decades, North Korea's nuclear program has grown from a proliferation problem to a military threat to its neighbours and the United States," Shane Smith, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University's Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction, wrote last summer in a comprehensive examination of the political and military dimensions of Pyongyang's nuclear posture.
Mr. Smith suggests outsiders have paid too little attention to the threat because of the "common caricature of North Korea as backward, unserious and incompetent that has led some to dismiss and down play its nuclear efforts."
Rather than posturing, Mr. Smith posits that Pyongyang is developing nuclear weapons and a delivery system "in line with a war-fighting strategy."