North Korea won't fire nuke ... but could sell one to Osama

IF North Korea's next act goes beyond launching another long-range missile, or conducting a nuclear weapons test, to an actual attack by a nuclear missile on South Korea or Japan then how would the US respond?

Answer: By an overwhelming retaliatory strike aimed at assuring that North Korea's attack was its last act.

Any leader who ordered the North Korean attack would be committing national suicide.

The US-Japanese Mutual Defence Treaty and US-South Korean Alliance commit the US to extend its "nuclear umbrella" to protect these allies.

An attack upon either of them would be equivalent to an attack upon the United States itself.

Threat

During the Cold War, the American strategists developed the doctrine of "nuclear deterrence" by credibly threatening a retaliatory response that assured destruction far in excess of any gains the Soviets could have hoped to achieve.

Despite sharp reductions in US and Russian arsenals, both today retain sufficient nuclear capabilities for an array of contingencies, including any North Korean attack.

Over the past two decades the US has also developed significant non-nuclear capabilities that would allow it to mount an overwhelming retaliatory response to a North Korean attack without having to use American nuclear weapons. The good news is that at least for the next several years, North Korea will not be technically capable of delivering a nuclear warhead on a missile.

North Korea has developed and is steadily improving its missile arsenal.

On Monday it tested a second nuclear bomb.

But miniaturising a nuclear bomb as a warhead and then marrying that payload to a missile remains "rocket-science" - beyond the hermit kingdom's current capacity.

The brutal reality is that if a North Korean nuclear bomb explodes devastating a Japanese, American or British city in the next few years, that bomb will have been delivered not by a missile launched by Kim Jong-il or his successors, but rather by Osama bin Laden or other terrorists who purchased the weapon from North Korea.

Unfortunately, a leader who between 2005 and 2007 sold and constructed a plutonium-producing nuclear reactor to Syria - and conducted two nuclear weapons tests in brazen defiance of the international community - could also imagine that he could sell a much smaller nuclear weapon to Osama bin Laden without being held accountable.

Challenge

The challenge for President Obama, Prime Minister Brown, members of the UN Security Council and the international community is to convince Kim Jong-il that he faces disastrous consequences.

If a bomb of North Korean origin explodes anywhere in the world, this will be treated precisely as if delivered by North Korea in a missile attack.

Advances in nuclear forensics will be needed to persuade North Korean leaders that their fingerprints will be found on the bomb or fallout from a bomb made by them.

So there must be a doctrine holding North Korea accountable for all nuclear weapons of North Korean origin.