NUKE REBUKE.(The Talk of the Town)

When Kim Jong Il, who seems to have modelled his villainy on old Jonny Quest cartoons, announced that his government had conducted a successful nuclear-weapons test, it was like watching the unhinged teen-ager in your neighborhood finally set a house on fire. He seeks attention, the experts tell us, and he wants some love. George W. Bush won't give it to him, of course. The President delivered his stern replies in the ominous dialect of nuclear warning, threatening to hold North Korea "fully accountable" if Kim sells bombs as freely as he has sold missiles. In deference to his Asian negotiating partners, and presumably aware that the military-strike options he intuitively prefers are not viable, Bush was otherwise subdued. He even allowed himself to say that American policy sought "a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula," which sounded more like a Eugene, Oregon, city-council resolution than his usual lecture on war and resolve.

The election season required a shouting match about whose negotiating tactics with North Korea were the most doomed. Certainly the Bush Administration contributed more than its share to the final result. By invading Iraq and failing there, it depleted every variety of American power fighting one enemy that possessed no nuclear weapons, while emboldening a second that was building a store of them, and a third, Iran, that has evidently decided that it must get some, and soon.

The Administration's fitful attempts at nuclear diplomacy have been undermined by its proud contempt for multilateral-treaty regimes. Its arms-control specialists, such as John Bolton, fantasize that they can stop nuclear proliferation the way the British Navy once tried to stop the slave trade: through military force and interdiction at sea. Moral suasion and sustained bargaining, the proven mechanisms of nuclear restraint in addition to deterrence, interest this Administration much less. Perhaps North Korea would have tested its nuclear bomb even if Bush had, from the outset of his Presidency, embraced the vision of nuclear abolition articulated by Ronald Reagan, or if he had advanced the policies of his father, and of Bill Clinton, by using American influence to negotiate actively to diminish the role of nuclear arms as instruments of state power. We'll never know.

The more important question now is whether we are witnessing the end of the formal nuclear order defined by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was opened for signature in 1968. That agreement proscribes all but five countries--the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France--from possessing nuclear weapons, in exchange for a pledge from the five to eliminate their own stockpiles at some unspecified future time. The International Atomic Energy Agency is the treaty's enforcement arm; other nuclear agreements often serve, in effect, as codicils.

A decade ago, the N.P.T. system, although hardly flawless (burdened, for instance, by Israel's defiance of the regime), looked to be in fairly ruddy health. As the Soviet Union broke up, Bush's father stripped thousands of targets from secret nuclear war plans, endorsed a large reduction in the size of the U.S. arsenal, and helped insure that Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus would surrender any bombs they inherited. Arduous diplomacy in the first years of the Clinton Administration confirmed these commitments; South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina also voluntarily gave ...