IN A world starved of old-fashioned, plain-evil Bond villains, at least there is Kim Jong Un. Witness the cackling glee exhibited by the chain-smoking Mr Kim and his generals when they celebrated North Korea’s launch of a ballistic missile from a submarine in August; or the tear-choked euphoria of one newsreader, in traditional Korean dress, as she declared success in the country’s fifth and largest nuclear test last month. In a world where morality comes in many shades of grey, the nuclear ambitions of Mr Kim, running a gulag masquerading as a country, are painted in black and white.

To many American policymakers, the submarine launch and nuclear test mark a turning point. Until now, North Korea’s missiles have threatened South Korea and Japan. Now its nuclear and missile programmes have improved with such speed and determination that they begin to threaten the United States itself. A nuclear attack on Los Angeles? Time to think about it. The summer’s tests, says Andrew Shearer of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, point to a possible “game-changer” for America. North Korea is rapidly climbing up to the top of the to-do list for the next American president. The question is whether America, which has long struggled to contain the North’s nuclear programmes, has anything left in its playbook.

The tests at least serve one useful purpose: to bury once and for all the delusions of successive American leaders that North Korea might be persuaded to negotiate away its nuclear programmes as a prelude to normalising ties. Such was the basis of the now-defunct “six-party talks” involving America, China, Japan, Russia and the two Koreas. The diplomacy was not wrong—you should want to negotiate with your enemy unless you have good reason not to. But the talks always favoured the North—winning it more aid, an easing of sanctions or more time for nuclear development. That was the point, as North Korea saw it.

As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute puts it, Americans have approached the North as if both sides share common points in their worldview and moral compass—leading to a wholesale misunderstanding. Perhaps that is inevitable when dealing with something so alien as a hereditary despotism underwritten by Leninist police-state powers. But the consequence for America has been years of confused policies.

One misunderstanding has been over the North’s hyperbolic propaganda. Of course, if you are a Hollywood screenwriter or even an American policymaker, the bombast is easy to satirise, as are Mr Kim’s jelly-bean looks, or the pantsuit and elevator shoes of his late father, Kim Jong Il. The elder Kim once kidnapped a South Korean film director and his actress wife because, he told them, he thought a lot of his own propaganda films were terrible.

Yet the propaganda is deadly serious. It is the outward expression of a messianic ideology that, along with all the surveillance and repression, has kept the Kim regime in power for more years than seemed possible. As Brian Myers of Dongseo University pointed out in “The Cleanest Race”, his study in 2010 of North Korea’s domestic propaganda, the regime’s version of Korean history is of an innocent race oppressed by child-abusers—American, Japanese and Chinese. Extreme notions of ethnic purity lie at the heart of the ideology (South Koreans have not only been corrupted by American capitalism but polluted by miscegenation, too). The North’s zealous mission, on which the regime’s legitimacy is built, is to reunify the Korean race and avenge it.

The road to this Elysium is where North Korea’s nuclear programmes come in, Mr Eberstadt makes clear. Once, other paths offered themselves, but that was before the sudden disappearance of Soviet patronage, the North’s own industrial decline and the South’s stubborn refusal to be swayed either by North Korea’s revolutionary message or its occasional acts of violent provocation. The nuclear option remains the only game in town. Its voluntary surrender would mean the end of the sacred mission of unification—and so the end of the regime itself. Forget it.

What to do? Diplomacy now has even less to offer. Any appeals the North may make to America for the normalisation of ties have only one aim: the withdrawal of America’s 28,000 troops from South Korea. And so pre-emptive strikes against North Korea are being talked about. South Korea recently said it would hit first if it believed the North was about to throw a punch. In Washington, some think-tankers now discuss, with surprising acceptance, the merits of attacking North Korean nuclear facilities—or even taking out Mr Kim himself. It is far from clear how such out-of-the-blue strikes might succeed. And they would involve a huge risk of retaliation. With cosmopolitan Seoul just 60km (40 miles) south of the demilitarised zone, it is hard to see South Korea giving approval. Without it, an American strike would rupture the alliance. So forget pre-emption too.

Let there be light

That still leaves ways to defend against the regime’s threat and blunt its capacities. A new American missile-defence system being deployed in South Korea is a big start. And what if every North Korean sub that left port never returned? America has weaponry aplenty that could make them disappear, fingerprint-less. Soon, Mr Kim would have no submarine capability—without America ever having said a word.

Elsewhere, sanctions could have much more bite—the measures that until recently applied to Iran were far harsher than the ones against the world’s most repugnant regime. America should go much harder after the money-laundering and trading networks that keep the North Korean regime afloat. All should demand that China agree to a safe route for refugees to get to the South. In the end, helping ordinary North Koreans to end their isolation would do more than anything to undermine the regime’s myths and enervate its sinews.