First and foremost, new incentives are being added for proliferation of nuclear weapons. The spectacle of a minor, bankrupt, starving, rump nation-state in a corner of northeast Asia holding hostage the world’s superpower, its allies, and its giant neighbor China, will not be lost on a motley crew of near-failed Afro-Asian regimes. There is the aura of nuclear weapons temporarily compensating for incompetence in pursuing modernity. That the world only respects naked power is a line enunciated even by President A.J. P. Kalam, when, as a scientist he pushed for weapons of mass destruction amidst all India’s horrendous economic and social problems.

A Pollyannaish theory sees widespread weapons of mass destruction resulting in a new if dangerous but relatively stable balance of power, of mutual assured destruction, harking back to the Cold War. But that formulation ignores increased probability of miscalculations when nuclear armaments proliferate. The Cuban missiles crisis demonstrated how two sophisticated military industrial machines might stumble into Armageddon. In a proliferated world, the new dimension would be the relative managerial incapacities of backward regimes and therefore an increased threat of accidental conflagration. That threat is all too apparent in the Indian subcontinent where after a half century the India-Pakistan feud has not been defused but now continues at a more dangerous level between two nuclear powers.

Even among more normal regimes, their voluntary abdication of nuclear weapons will now undergo new scrutiny. Not only Japan, with an almost immediate capacity to arm nuclearly, but South Korea, Australia, and Taiwan, would have to reconsider their security options.

A falling away of the international anti-proliferation apparatus — as deficient as it has been with those who never adhered to it such as India and Pakistan and Israel, those who withdrew such as North Korea, or those who flaunted it such as Iran — would inevitably lead to nuclear armaments joining arsenals, at whatever cost to their economies and societies.

But North Korean success in producing nuclear weapons poses another insidious problem for the U.S.’ security and for other “stakeholders” in a post 9/11 world. Already complicit in illicit proliferation of missiles and nuclear technology to a half dozen other regimes, Pyongyang now showcases its purported nuclear products for further sales. To keep going the Kim regime would be obliged to go to the world’s WMD black market since it has rejected reversing its development strategies. Through lavish Shanghai visits by Dear Leader, Beijing has tried to convince Pyongyang there was another route to preserving the regime. But Kim, apparently, believes he cannot repeat Deng Xiaoping’s formula of tossing Maoist economics but without abandoning the Communist Party dictatorship. Instead it has chosen to put all its bets on developing WMD technology.

A regime which has used every device from currency counterfeiting to peddling narcotics to kidnapping espionage “internees” is a prime candidate for selling nuclear, chemical and biological weaponry to non-state terrorists. Although it had its own peculiarities, A.Q. Khan’s network operating from Pakistan demonstrated how incidental state sponsorship, individual greed, and commercial networks could facilitate such operations, flying in the face of international safeguards.

Yet above and beyond all these threats another hangs over North Korea’s neighbors and the world. That is fact the regime whatever its immediate decisions is inherently unstable. True, its ruthless founder, once a Soviet protégé, Kim Il-Sung, was able to pass the absolute monarchy to his son, who is now trying to do the same with his offspring.

But now parallels with East Germany are increasingly obvious. Just as on the eve of its collapse, while the Pankow regime was seen as deficient in all humanitarian aspects by the West, it was also believed to be a strong military and industrial police state. The Germans are still trying to pick up the pieces from that misapprehension.

News of mass starvation has pierced any such image of North Korea. Yet whatever the machinations within Kim Jong-Il’s bizarre corterie, its stability is probably being overestimated. Beijing, apparently, worries most about the possibility of collapse as do the South Koreans who are fixated on the German “lesson” Both see themselves as its victims for a variety of reasons.

So the Chinese [and South Korea] now face the choice of joining Japan and the U.S. in a game of chicken with Kim, invoking sanctions which would bring him to heel but risk his collapse, or permitting him defiance and possession of nuclear weapons. But whether Beijing and Seoul move decisively or not in this crisis, the Kim regime’s innate instability will persist. Just as the Communist states in Central and Eastern Europe imploded, only in part because of Western pressure, but because of their own characteristics, that possibility grows inside North Korea.

On its way to arming itself with nukes, North Korea could be all the more dangerous if it falls victim to its own inadequacies. That kind of scenario, unfortunately, makes it an ever increasingly dangerously threat.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.