South Like North? North Like South? The Great Korean Flap

LOS ANGELES - Fundamentally, as they tend to say in particle physics, the big brouhaha over the secret South Korean uranium enrichment experiment is an absurdity.

After all, the amount of fissionable material produced at the national laboratory as currently reported -- was trivial: It was about as big-time weapons-grade in the sense of a paper airplane requesting 747-landing rights at Kimpo Airport. The whole flap is curious in the extreme.

Seoul voluntarily reported the unauthorised experiment to international authorities, and that should be the end of it. But all sorts of unhelpful parties in the region may want to use the errant experiment for their own purposes.

North Koreans may say that the clandestine South Korean programme puts both Koreas in a plane of moral equivalency. It doesn't: South Korea is a far more transparent society and the North Korean nuclear programme is thus far more worrisome.

Some Japanese circles may want to point to the Seoul admission as further evidence that the Landing of the Rising Sun needs to get cracking and develop its own nuclear weapons programme. That would be the worst development imaginable for peace and security.

And China, rightly pushing its Six-Party Talks aimed at denuclearising the Korean peninsula, may point to the revelation as reason for more urgent diplomacy; but of course nothing substantive will happen until after the results of the American elections.

How did the flap start? At the end of the day, the origins of the illicit experiment will probably be tracable to South Korean nuclear scientists who did a bit of lab-toying-around on their own. Such amoral conduct would easily track with that of other scientists elsewhere who tend to take matters into their own hands and act as if they are above the law.

The revelation also reminds us that any state that has the steel, will want a nuclear capability (whether subterranean or otherwise) and will proceed apace, no matter what anyone else says. South Korea appears not to be in that category, but then there is the question of Iran and Pakistan. It is US policy - as well as the policy of the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council - to seek to stymie the increase in the number of nuclear powers, on the entirely plausible ground that fewer is better. But, then again, as India might put it, it is easy to take this line when one already possesses such weapons than when one is on the outside looking in at the comfy nuclear club luxuriating in its high moral line.

The ideal number of nuclear powers would be zero, of course. But until and unless the United States - along with China, Russia, France and Great Britain - agrees to stuff the nuclear genie back in the bottle by advancing nuclear disarmament by leadership example, others will continually be tempted to lust after nuclear potency, too.

Even so, the danger the world faces is not so much from direct nuclear exchange between nuclear states that are in control of their militaries as well as their mental faculties. Rather, as famed theoretical physicist Norman Dombey puts it in the current London Review of Books, "It follows that the international community should focus on the weak link in the non-proliferation regime: that's to say, states which possess nuclear weapons and are not fully in control of their territory or of their citizens." Seen from this analytical perspective, therefore, nothing on the Korean Peninsula - North or South - is anything as worrisome as Pakistan, against which since 9/11 the US has had to snuggle up ally-style.

The US – the first and only nation-state to have used such weapons in combat – thus is somewhat responsible for developments there, and is also morally culpable for relying on nuclear weapons as a core part of its military arsenal. "We call upon the citizens of the United States to look squarely at the reality of the tragedies that have unfolded in the wake of the atomic bombings 59 years ago," wrote Iccho Itoh, mayor of Nagasaki, in the Nagasaki Peace Declaration last month on the occasion of the 59th anniversary of the atomic destruction of his city. So long as the world's leading superpower fails to change its posture of dependence on nuclear weapons, it is clear that the tide of nuclear proliferation cannot be stemmed.

Nagasaki's mayor is right. This is the bottom line on nuclear proliferation. We need a world free from nuclear weapons; and so we need a re-moralised US to take the lead and bequeath planet earth a fate free of nuclear holocaust. For some kind of future nuclear tragedy would seem probable in the absence of transcendent American renunciation.