Bush's nuclear failure

The US is right to reject North Korea's demand for bilateral negotiations, in the wake of the regime's stark announcement on Thursday that it had nuclear weapons and was abandoning multilateral talks. Kim Il Sung's hermit kingdom has long sought to use its nuclear threat to bargain directly with the world's only superpower.

The US is right to reject North Korea's demand for bilateral negotiations, in the wake of the regime's stark announcement on Thursday that it had nuclear weapons and was abandoning multilateral talks. Kim Il Sung's hermit kingdom has long sought to use its nuclear threat to bargain directly with the world's only superpower.

On one level it is terrifying that a Stalinist, paranoid state such as North Korea should at last confirm what the world has pretty much known for at least a decade. But in the meantime we have learned to live with the fact that other nations, including India and Pakistan, which have gone to war with each other three times, have nuclear weapons as well. The question America has to answer is how to reduce the incentive for yet more to follow.

Here the Bush administration has unquestionably failed. While yoking North Korea with Iraq and Iran in an "axis of evil", it avoided dealing with the Pyongyang regime as a fight it could not win. Instead it went after Iraq, the member of the trio furthest from developing nuclear weapons (however much it might have liked to), and used the nuclear spectre as a pretext to invade the country. Small wonder that Iran has concluded that its safety lies in getting the bomb as fast as possible.