In this space last week, I commented that the choice for the United States in North Korea was probably between a catastrophic war and permitting North Korea to keep its nuclear program and its reported small nuclear arsenal, and I suggested that of the two alternatives the second, though itself highly undesirable, was the better. It was anything but obvious, however, that such a course would be adopted, much less that this would happen just one week later. Yet the retreat may in fact now be under way. According to the New York Times, the Bush Administration has given up its goal of preventing North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons and instead will concentrate on stopping it from exporting nuclear materials to others. "The President said that the central worry is not what they've got, but where it goes," an Administration official told the paper. But since, as the Times points out in an accompanying editorial, this goal is as unlikely to be achieved as preventing the creation of the materials in the first place, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the new policy is anything more than a fig leaf designed to disguise the failure of the old policy. In effect, the Administration has decided that in the case of North Korea, at least, proliferation is better than war.

The reversal of policy is dramatic. Let us recall that in his State of the Union address in 2002, delivered four months after the attack of September 11, the President declared what in effect was an ultimatum to proliferators: "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." He placed three regimes in the "worst" category--Iraq, Iran and North Korea--and famously called them an axis of evil. His policy up-ended the precedents of half a century. Previously, the United States had pursued nonproliferation solely by diplomatic and political means. It had never attacked a nation to stop it from obtaining either nuclear weapons or any other weapon of mass destruction. Now the Bush Administration proposed to stop proliferation by force.

The United States has just forcibly removed the regime in Iraq in pursuit of the President's policy. The proclaimed goals of the war were two: to seize weapons of mass destruction allegedly possessed by that regime and to demonstrate to other countries what might happen to them if they seek weapons of mass destruction. Quite recently, the President stated that "any outlaw regime that has ties to terrorist groups, and seeks and possesses weapons of mass destruction, is a grave danger to the civilized world, and will be confronted." In the meantime, however, the North Korean regime has been learning an opposite lesson. It decided that the path to safety--the way to avoid "regime change" by the United States--was not to forgo nuclear weapons but to obtain them immediately in order to have, in its words, a "powerful deterrent." In making this decision, the North Korean government was not doing anything unusual. From the first days of the nuclear age down to the present, nuclear proliferation has been driven by the fear of nuclear attack by others. Even the United States, the world's first nuclear proliferator, built the bomb because it feared that Hitler would get one first. Later, the policy of preventing nuclear attack by threatening nuclear retaliation was formalized in the strategy of nuclear deterrence, which became an almost unchallengeable dogma during the cold war years.

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