THE apocalyptic streak of the North Korean regime is showing. On February 19th, a week after its third test of a nuclear bomb, one of its officials, attending (of all things) a United Nations meeting about disarmament, compared South Korea and its condemnation of the test to “a newborn puppy” that “knows no fear of a tiger”. He then threatened its “final destruction”. For good measure, a North Korean government agency with the job of releasing improving videos on YouTube posted one showing American soldiers and Barack Obama consumed by flames, with a cartoon simulation of a nuclear test. It is hardly the behaviour of a state about to negotiate its own “denuclearisation”.

Indeed, last year North Korea adopted a new preamble to its constitution, describing itself as a “nuclear state and a militarily powerful state that is indomitable”. And since its successful test of a space rocket—little different from one that might carry a nuclear warhead—in December and its latest explosion, it has made clear that it hopes to force America, its arch-enemy, to negotiate not over its nuclear arsenal but rather its demands for recognition and security guarantees. No American president, especially one roasted on YouTube, could accept talks on those terms. Yet no American government, nor that of any other country, is ready to accept North Korea as the “nuclear state” it claims to be. So for the experts on North Korea, nuclear safety and proliferation gathered at a conference in Seoul this week, the outlook was gloomy.

Chung Mong-joon, founder of the Asan Institute, the think-tank that organised the conference, resorted to Aesop’s fables to sum up the predicament. The Greek fabulist provided the name for the “sunshine” policy which previous South Korean governments adopted towards the North. The sun and the north wind compete to make a traveller remove his cloak. The cold wind only makes him wrap up tighter; sunshine does the trick. But it failed with North Korea, which kept working on its nuclear programme even as it pretended to be discussing its termination at six-party talks with America, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. A more relevant Aesop fable, Mr Chung suggested, was the one about the frog that agrees to help carry a scorpion across a river, taken in by its promise not to sting, since that would entail the scorpion’s own drowning as well as the frog’s. But the scorpion stings anyway. That, after all, is its nature.

The only consolation is that experts concur that North Korea’s sting is not as dangerous as it pretends. The North is at an early stage in developing both a bomb and a delivery system. It will be a long time before it directly threatens America. A more immediate danger, however, is that it sells its know-how or material to terrorists unbothered about hitting targets with any precision, or to another state, such as Iran, which was reported to have a senior representative monitoring the latest North Korean test.

The world has run out of ideas about how to disarm North Korea. Negotiations appear impossible. Economic sanctions have proved ineffective. Meanwhile, military strikes might provoke a catastrophic escalation. So the West is left to look to China to rein in its ally. At least that would seem to be in China’s own interests. A nuclear North Korea compromises its security, by encouraging Japan and South Korea to upgrade their missile defences and to contemplate their own nuclear options. A poll after the latest test by the Asan Institute shows two-thirds of South Koreans backing an indigenous nuclear programme and the return of American battlefield nuclear weapons. These were withdrawn after the two Koreas agreed in 1992 to make the peninsula nuclear-free (a deal the North now regards as null and void).

Moreover, last month China endorsed a UN Security Council resolution condemning December’s rocket launch, and warned North Korea not to conduct a nuclear test. A Communist Party newspaper argued that if it went ahead, China should “reduce its assistance”, which, in the form of fuel and food, keeps North Korea going. In Seoul, Shi Yinhong, a scholar in international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, called it nonsense to suggest that China was beginning to see North Korea as less of a strategic asset and more of a liability. North Korea, he said, had always been a liability, ever since 1950, when Kim Jong Un’s grandfather started the Korean war, embroiling China. Now, however, China’s indulgence appears to be stretched to breaking point. It shocked and angered the Pyongyang authorities by supporting the UN resolution on North Korea’s rocket launch.

Even Mr Shi, however, thinks it neither likely nor desirable that China would cut the Kim dynasty loose. Continued influence allows China at least to try to moderate North Korean behaviour. It still sees North Korea as an important buffer between China and the American troops in South Korea. China fears chaos and regime collapse more than it does a nuclear-armed North Korea.

So, true to form, China now seems ready to indulge its neighbour. Global Times, the paper that had threatened punishment, now argues that China should give North Korea a ticking off but that “the warning should be one that informs a strategic friend about China’s bottom line. China cannot join the camp of the US, South Korea and Japan, by making North Korea China’s enemy.”

The sting in the tail

That leaves the West with two feeble hopes. In the short term, maybe North Korea can be induced to pretend that it is prepared to put its nuclear assets on the negotiating table. But willing the scorpion to lie seems no better than hoping to trust it. In the longer term, one day the Kim dynasty must surely fall under the weight of its own evil incompetence. But even that prospect contains fear as well as hope. As Kim Sung-han, a South Korean deputy foreign minister, puts it, weapons of mass destruction have become the regime’s “survival kit”. One circumstance where it might actually use them is if it were in imminent danger.

Economist.com/blogs/banyan