Brat

It was obviously a slow news day for local events. Philippine media was all over itself, interviewing relatives of Filipinos working in South Korea and asking government officials about evacuation plans, in the aftermath of North Korea’s reported nuclear test.

There was very little reason for the panic.

To begin with, the results of Pyongyang’s explosive testing could not be independently verified. US authorities initially reported that nothing registered on their seismic surveillance equipment. Russia reported what could be, by current standards, a small blast.

If Pyongyang was indeed able to detonate a nuclear weapon, that is, to be sure, a major leap in its program of building up a military nuclear capacity. Whether it has a reliable nuclear warhead capacity remains a big question. Whether it can deploy that weapon, given its laughable missile capability, is a bigger question still.

The last time Pyongyang tested its missiles, a few months ago, the affair was an embarrassment. The missiles flew in all directions but the intended target areas. Some failed to lift off.

It will take a few more years of development for North Korea to be a credible nuclear threat – so all the frantic phone calls to relatives in South Korea is a waste of passion.

At the moment, if Pyongyang wants to blast South Korea out of existence, it will have to load a nuclear weapon on a truck and drive across the heavily fortified demilitarized zone.

The financial markets, jittery after the initial report, have settled down quickly, realizing that the threat horizon is a bit far off. Business has returned to usual and South Korean stocks have recovered lost value.

But the security order in the region is changed permanently.

Imagine if Japan were a nuclear power. Then it would value the nuclear security umbrella provided by the US much less. With that changed configuration of her own security perceptions, Japanese policies will probably be very different from what it is now.

Now, by detonating her own nuclear device, North Korea becomes a strategic power unto herself. Pyongyang does not need to rely on the security umbrella provided her by China since the end of the Korean War.

The biggest deduction in the complex regional equation happened to China’s ability to influence North Korea’s behavior. Pyongyang is no longer Beijing’s little brother. She will now see herself, rightly or wrongly, as a world power of equal standing.

Radioactivity has a way of warping the minds of tyrants, particularly.

In Pyongyang, we have something that is more than a tyranny. We have a personality cult built around the father and now inherited by the son. We have a regime that is so thoroughly marinated in its own bizarre ideological brew, incapable of perceiving the world proportionate to how the rest of the world perceives itself.

In simplest terms, we have in North Korea a situation akin to giving a raving madman a gun.

And that is not the end of it.

While North Korea squanders its limited resources on armaments and on endless monuments to the personality cult, its people are starving. The country is not meant to be an agricultural power to begin with – what with its desolate soil and cruel winters. Decades of misallocation of resources, under some insane "self-reliance" ideology, has resulted in a country that is there just to feed the army.

No one depends on North Korea for anything. Yet, increasingly, North Korea depends on everybody else for most of its needs: food, fuel, technology.

South Korea, through its industrial conglomerates, has been extending aid to the north. China has been keeping the food line moving.

The one thing that North Korea truly needs, and which the rest of us are just too willing to supply, is a new political leadership in touch with this century.

Already isolated, Pyongyang is now courting sanctions for breaking the quiet order of nuclear non-proliferation. For entirely ideological reasons, it can, like Iran, rant and rave about the "injustice" of some countries allowed to have nuclear arms and others prohibited from doing so.

But that is a non-issue. It is tragedy enough that some countries have nuclear arms. It will be a greater tragedy if more countries possess them.

The drift of modern civilization is not proliferation but disarmament. Not more countries with nuclear arms, but no countries with these terrible technologies.

What is basically objectionable to the North Korean nuclear effort is that it forces the rest of us to arm in defense. It aggravates that nuclear problem rather than alleviate it – especially given the state of mind of Pyongyang.

But why, despite the certainty of sanctions, is this madman Kim Jong-il so obsessed with developing nuclear weapons despite the fact that he could not feed his people?

Well, precisely because he could not feed his people. He has built a nation so useless to the community of nations, he needs the terrible technologies of mass destruction to have any chip on the bargaining table. He needs an army fed with delusions of importance in the world stage so that it will stand by this irrational social order.

The more his armaments, the hungrier his people. The stronger his army, the more economically unsustainable his regime. The more he relies on threatening his neighbors, the less functional North Korea becomes in the community of states.

More than the actual use of these weapons beyond North Korea’s borders, the thing to be really bothered about is the ideological insanity these weapons signify. That ideological insanity paves the way to a humanitarian calamity that, in the end, we will all be called upon to help alleviate when it happens. And only because we, unlike Kim Jong-il, feel compassionately for our fellow men.