Perhaps the most fascinating thing about North Korea conducting what U.S. intelligence now believes, on the basis of radiation sampling, was an actual nuclear test, is how little it substantively changes the strategic equation in northern Asia.

North Korea is still an isolated regime that calls attention to itself from time to time by doing something it knows will outrage most of the rest of the world. Whether these pathetic little displays of dubious military prowess mean it wants to join the rest of the world  become a “responsible member of the world community” as fantasists like to put it, or simply reduce its isolation and import something besides movies and expensive Scotch  is difficult to know. If that is so, it is at least possible that the regime poses nowhere near the threat our big thinkers believe it does, but the way the U.S. is responding to the test makes it likely that we will never know.

Our supposed experts have now pondered the evidence of what seems to have been, from an initial analysis of the seismic data, a low-grade nuclear weapon. They did this through analysis of radiation patterns near the blast. The North Koreans say they were careful to seal the underground test area so that no radiation escaped  which some interpreted as a possible attempt to conceal the fact that the explosion did not emit radiation. But apparently it did.

It thus seems likely, because of the rather small seismic footprint of the explosion, that Anthony Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, had it about right. He suggested in the first hours after the test that the explosion could be “a fizzle or failed test of a larger design. It is far easier to get some yield than an efficient weapon. Such a failure could come from either a gun or implosion device.”

Know Not Much

The fact that we know as little as we do suggests that U.S. intelligence services, despite the billions poured into them, are not especially effective and may not be getting much better. Even if the North Koreans did explode a nuclear device, however, that changes surprisingly little about the essential North Korean situation.

We have known for some years, in part through intelligence and in part because they say so, that North Korea seeks to be known as a nuclear power. In some sick way  and it is hardly just the North Koreans who are afflicted by this syndrome  leaders of nation-states in the contemporary world see possession of nuclear weapons as a status symbol, a mechanism for being taken seriously by the “world community.”

North Korea is also quite aware that it was named one of the three countries in President Bush’s “axis of evil,” and that the U.S. invaded the first country so named. It almost certainly sees the possession of a nuclear weapon  or the widespread perception that it has one, which might be just as effective  as a deterrent against the U.S. invasion its leaders claim to believe is imminent.

We have also known for decades that North Korea lurches between being the “hermit state” that seeks to withdraw from the rest of the world in search of a Stalinist purity that was outdated when Stalin was still alive, and doing outrageous things to attract world attention. For symbolic reasons, partially having to do with the fact that the Korean War was never formally ended through a peace treaty and partially because the U.S. maintains some 37,000 troops on the Korean peninsula, the country it most likes to tweak is the United States.

Few Good Choices

The problem with most of the conventional approaches, including military approaches, to North Korea is that they are unlikely to be effective. North Korea has thousands of long-range artillery pieces trained on the South Korean capital of Seoul. A military strike could mean hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilian casualties. U.S. forces stationed in Korea could also be vulnerable. Their current function is to serve as a tripwire more than a deterrent  a guarantee that if conflict breaks out the United States will be involved.

The intelligent thing for the United States to do, however, is to reduce its involvement. Condoleezza Rice says that her current round of diplomacy in the region is not geared to destabilizing the region or ratcheting up the sense of confrontation. But the presence of the United States, especially taking the lead role our apparatchiks insist upon, is itself more destabilizing than almost any other imaginable course. Insisting, as President Bush does, that a North Korean nuke is “unacceptable” without actually doing anything substantial about it simply increases uncertainty and almost certainly undermines stability.

Do Not Much

When you get beyond the feverish rhetoric about the dire peril of a North Korean nuke, it’s hard not to notice that when it comes to action, most of the countries involved are concerned, but not concerned enough to take decisive action. Even the United States, whose government leaders have a vested interest in magnifying every pipsqueak dictatorship that annoys us into a dire and imminent threat, are taking what some might view as a lackadaisical approach to the matter.

And that just might be the right approach.

Let’s go down the list. China, North Korea’s chief trading partner and patron, could almost certainly have prevented a North Korean nuclear weapons program if it were near the top of China’s priority list. Almost all the petroleum and much of the food North Korea relies on comes from or through China. At the same time, however, China is reluctant to apply too much pressure.

China sees North Korea as a buffer between it and U.S. troops in South Korea. Beijing undoubtedly has ambivalent feelings about the Pyongyang regime and occasionally finds it actively annoying. But it also fears a collapse of the regime, not only for strategic regions but because it fears a massive influx of refugees from North Korea should the regime collapse or implode. So it chose not to apply sufficient pressure to deter Kim Jong Il’s weapons program. Perhaps it now believes that was a mistake, but it still isn’t doing much that’s overtly dramatic.

South Korea has for several years pursued a “sunshine” policy toward North Korea, taking a long-term approach calculated to promote bringing the hermit kingdom out of its seclusion little by little, with an eye toward eventual reunification. That policy did not prevent a nuclear test, and has caused a certain amount of soul-searching in Seoul. But the South Koreans are unlikely to abandon the “sunshine” policy completely. Over the long haul, defusing tension with the North is in its strongest interest.

Other Priorities

Preventing a nuclear test, which may or may not presage actual weapons, is a lower priority and will continue to be. Regime change is also not high on the priority list because a collapse of the Pyongyang regime would almost certainly lead to enormous expenditures in rebuilding the North. South Korean scholars and policymakers have studied the reunification of Germany intensively, and hope for a less expensive process. South Korea also knows full well that while it would likely win a war eventually, North Korea’s conventional military capability  a million-man army and all that artillery trained on Seoul  is enough to make a military conflict an unwelcome prospect.

Japan, which after all has had a North Korean missile fired over it, may be the most concerned about a North Korean nuke. But preventing a test was not its highest priority either, though there’s some doubt whether Japan could have taken steps effective enough to deter Pyongyang’s nuke testers.

North Korea is almost entirely isolated economically, so economic sanctions are likely to impose little pain. Targeted sanctions against materials that could be used in a nuclear weapons program might be marginally useful, but it seems likely they would simply raise the cost of North Korea acquiring such materiel, not cutting off the flow completely.

North Korea is run by a barbarous regime whose very existence is an affront to the ideals of liberty. But it is not a direct threat to the United States. Now would be a good time to inform North Korea’s neighbors, South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, that this is their problem to confront.

Japan is already talking about starting a nuclear weapons program, though changing or reinterpreting its essentially but decreasingly pacifist constitution might take a while. The other countries mentioned have all condemned the North Korean test but left vague just what they are willing to do. There’s talk of South Korea and Taiwan developing nuclear weapons as a deterrent against anything zany the North Koreans might think of doing. If the U.S. visibly handed off the problem to the country’s neighbors it would focus their minds on the practical. But they might just decide that they can live with a North Korean nuke.

While Russia shares a border with North Korea, it doesn’t care much whether the regime has a nuke. Its own thousands of warheads left over from the Soviet era seem to be a sufficient deterrent.

Leave It to the Neighbors

The United States might do well to take to heart what North Korea’s neighbors think  judging by their action or inaction rather than their words  about the tremendous danger posed by an impoverished regime fully dependent on China for almost all necessities of life. Maybe it’s not a precursor to Armageddon.

Instead, of course, the U.S. is escalating concern. Condi Rice has reassured Japan that it’s still under the protection of the U.S. nuclear umbrella, thus extending the reach and the commitments of our country into an area where prudence might suggest scaling back our commitments.

Among the proposals I’ve heard, my favorite comes from Ted Carpenter, vice president for defense and international studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. Make a deal with China, he suggests, for them to take out Kim Jong Il’s odious regime in North Korea (China could do it whereas the U.S. probably couldn’t) in exchange for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula (which makes sense anyway).

In short, this is no time for panic. North Korea’s regime is despicable but not a direct threat. There’s plenty of time to hand the problem off to the country’s neighbors, who will have to live with the consequences of the choices they make in the coming months and years. There are reasons to be concerned beyond the neighborhood in that North Korea could be proliferators of weapons systems and for the right price might make weapons available to a regime like Iran or even to terrorist groups. But the genuine threat is nowhere near so dire as the headlines and the frantic diplomacy might suggest.