John Rapley

OXFORD, England:

I stepped off the plane to meet the glorious sunshine of London on an autumn day.

Enjoy it while you can: this is, after all, England, and by the time I reached Oxford the clouds had returned and a dreary, steady rain had taken over. How fitting the bleakness was to help me greet the news that North Korea had made good on its threat to one day detonate a nuclear bomb.

There is a bit of mystery about the incident, as there always is with the hermitic, secretive regime of Kim Jong-il. The blast was so small that some observers wondered if it was even nuclear. However, it is likely that spy satellites would have picked up the large shipments of explosives required for a conventional detonation. The emerging consensus thus appears to be that this was indeed a nuclear explosion, but one that fizzled.

Kim's motives

If that's the case, it would appear that in the high-stakes poker which Kim loves to play, he just played a bad hand. It is all but impossible to read the mind of a man to whom Western intelligence has virtually no access. But if one had to guess his motives, it would be that he wanted to send a warning to Washington not to try messing with him.

Yet nobody will be quaking in their boots at the thought of a crude nuclear bomb like this one. Weapons experts say it couldn't even be delivered by a missile, and so is a threat to nobody.

However, in the meantime, Pyongyang has succeeded in antagonising all its neighbours. South Korea, which has been arguing for diplomatic engagement with the North, may now join the tough sanctions regime the U.S. would like to impose. China- one of North Korea's few friends, though it is a mark of the North's isolation that the friendship is testy at best - is apparently incensed that Pyongyang defied its will. Japan's government will find reason to step up its militarisation.

On one hand, this plays into Washington's hands, eager as it is to further isolate North Korea. On the other, it has to worry the White House if its regional partners lose faith in its deterrent effect. If, for instance, Japan judges that the U.S. cannot prevent North Korea going nuclear, it may decide to go that route itself. How many other countries - both in East Asia, and elsewhere in the world - might decide to follow suit? The principle of non-proliferation would seem dead in the water.

Washington can do nothing

So while this may play into the U.S.'s hands for the time being, in other ways, Washington might have blundered. The Bush administration's decision to place North Korea in the axis of evil may well have encouraged Kim to seek nuclear weapons as a deterrent. And with the U.S. bogged down by the first candidate on the axis 'hit-list,' Iraq, there is really nothing Washington can do to pressure North Korea militarily.

It is thus placing its hope in sanctions. This is a tricky weapon to handle, though. The belligerence of Pyongyang may reveal the regime's weakness. With few friends, a large but in many ways weak military, and an imploding economy, many diplomats fear North Korea could easily go over the edge. The South worries that a collapsing North Korea might try to take itself down with it. In any event, regime collapse would probably unleash destabilising refugee flows into the region.

But if all that is alarming, the spectre of a nuclear North Korea is even moreso. For that reason, the uneasy coalition arrayed against Pyongyang will likely hold, at least for now.

John Rapley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.