As North Korea becomes the eighth confirmed nuclear power (Israel is not confirmed but considered the ninth) some of the blame has to go to the original five nuclear powers. When the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty went into effect in 1970, the five countries who had nuclear bombs - the US, France, China, Great Britain, and the USSR - agreed to work to reduce and eventually eliminate their nuclear ar5enals.

Now, 36 years later, no disarmament talks are taking place between those countries. North Korea has been a "threshold" country since the late 80s. The fall of the Soviet Union eliminated shared security arrangements and prompted North Korea to aggressively pursue a nuclear weapon.

The Clinton administration, recognizing the threat, entered into an agreement with North Korea to provide reactors for peaceful use in exchange for an end to the weapons program. In 2003, North Korea announced they were leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty and reconstituting its weapons program, citing US failure to deliver the reactors.

North Korea's joining the list of nations with nuclear weapons is a sad day for our world. As was the day that the United States became the first nuclear power, and the Soviet Union the second, etc.… As long as one country possesses the ability to annihilate another it is only natural for those without that power to seek it.

In the early 90s, during the lead-up to the extension of the treaty, the US and other nuclear powers agreed to stop testing nuclear weapons. It was widely believed that without that step many other "threshold" nations would not have remained in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has been a long time since the original five nuclear powers have made any progress in negotiating a reduction in their ar5enals; in fact the Bush administration is building new lower-yield nukes with conventional uses that could spur a new arms race.

If all of the nuclear powers that are condemning North Korea are serious about stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, perhaps they should read and come into compliance with the following section of the treaty they first signed in 1970 and extended in 1995:

Article VI Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.

It should also be noted that it is possible for countries to leave the nuclear club. North Korea would have been the 10th country if South Africa hadn't abolished their nuclear weapons.

Iran May Not Be Next

In 2003, during his winning presidential campaign in Brazil, candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva criticized the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty as unfair. "If someone asks me to disarm and keep a slingshot while he comes at me with a cannon, what good does that do?" da Silva asked in a speech. He later said Brazil has no intention to develop nuclear arms. That is a good thing; I support non-proliferation, but the sentiment that da Silva expressed will continue to grow as more and more nations feel they are being conned by the nuclear powers.

Let us hope that North Korea is the last to build the bomb, but let's also hope that one day North Korea, France, Great Britain, Israel, Pakistan, India, Russia, China, and the United States dismantle the bombs they have and eliminate the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Moments after hearing about North Korea's nuclear test, I thought of Albert Einstein's statement that "there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world."

During the six decades since Einstein spoke, experience has shown that such understanding and insistence cannot be filtered through the grid of hypocrisy. Nuclear weapons can't be controlled by saying, in effect, "Do as we say, not as we do." By developing their own nuclear weaponry, one nation after another has replied to the nuclear-armed states: Whatever you say, we'll do as you've done.

In early summer, with some fanfare, officials in Washington announced the dismantling of the last W56 nuclear warhead - a 1.2 megaton model from the 1960s. Self-congratulation was in the air, as a statement hailed "our firm commitment to reducing the size of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile to the lowest levels necessary for national security needs." That's the kind of soothing PR that we've been getting ever since the nuclear age began.

Right now, the US government has upwards of 10,000 nuclear bombs and warheads in its ar5enal. And - as the Washington Post uncritically reported the same week as the announcement about the end of the W56 warhead - Congress and the White House are resolutely moving ahead with plans for "a new generation of US nuclear weapons" under the rubric of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program: "The nation's two nuclear weapons design centers, the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, are competing to design the first RRW.... A second RRW design competition may provide an opportunity to the losing lab."

For more than 50 years, Washington has preached the global virtues of 'peaceful' nuclear power reactors - while denying their huge inherent dangers and their crucial role in proliferating nuclear weaponry. The denial meant that people and the environment would suffer all along the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to nuclear waste, and that the 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island would be followed by the continuing horrors of Chernobyl.

In recent decades, the denial has also spread nuclear weapons across the planet. Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea can thank the apostles of the nuclear-power gospel - and the companion profiteers of nuclear exports - for the technological pipeline that has funneled the capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

President Dwight Eisenhower's delusional and deluding speech to the UN General Assembly on December 8, 1953, now has a macabre echo: "The United States pledges before you - and therefore before the world - its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma - to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life."

Running parallel to the mendacious career of the "peaceful atom," US foreign policy has hit new lows during the last several years. The invasion of Iraq, on the pretext of non-existent WMDs, sent a powerful message. If the US government was inclined to launch an attack before a country had the capability to generate a mushroom cloud, then the country would be protected from such attack by developing nuclear weapons as soon as possible.

Coupled with the contempt for genuine diplomacy that the Bush administration has repeatedly shown, Washington's eagerness to use military might has fueled the dangers of a nuclear-weapons standoff with North Korea. Two of the sacred axioms of the Bush regime - secrecy and violence - cannot solve this problem and in fact can only make it worse. Einstein was correct; with nuclear weapons, "there is no secret and there is no defense."

As for "the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world" - that will need to come from us. Starting now.

Rest assured that while President Bush was at a podium in the White House on Monday denouncing the North Korean nuclear test as a "provocative act," Karl Rove was hard at work to fine-tune plans for a rhetorical onslaught linking this crisis to the "war on terror." Bush was already laying the groundwork for such an effort as he spoke - warning of "a grave threat to the United States" if North Korea gives nuclear-related technology to "any state or non-state actor."

For the next four weeks, the Bush administration will do its best to exploit the North Korean nuclear test to stave off a loss of the Republican majority in Congress. We should not allow those efforts to obscure how Bush's reckless record has heightened the nuclear dangers for everyone.