North Korea's declared nuclear bomb test program will increase the incentives for other nations to go nuclear, will endanger security in the region and could ultimately result in nuclear terrorism. While this test is the culmination of North Korea's long-held aspiration to become a nuclear power, it also demonstrates the total failure of the Bush administration's policy toward that country. For almost six years this policy has been a strange combination of harsh rhetoric and inaction.

President Bush, early in his first term, dubbed North Korea a member of the "axis of evil" and made disparaging remarks about Kim Jong Il. He said he would not tolerate a North Korean nuclear weapons program, but he set no bounds on North Korean actions.

The most important such limit would have been on reprocessing spent fuel from North Korea's reactor to make plutonium. The Clinton administration declared in 1994 that if North Korea reprocessed, it would be crossing a "red line," and it threatened military action if that line was crossed. The North Koreans responded to that pressure and began negotiations that led to the Agreed Framework. The Agreed Framework did not end North Korea's aspirations for nuclear weapons, but it did result in a major delay. For more than eight years, under the Agreed Framework, the spent fuel was kept in a storage pond under international supervision.

Then in 2002, the Bush administration discovered the existence of a covert program in uranium, evidently an attempt to evade the Agreed Framework. This program, while potentially serious, would have led to a bomb at a very slow rate, compared with the more mature plutonium program. Nevertheless, the administration unwisely stopped compliance with the Agreed Framework. In response the North Koreans sent the inspectors home and announced their intention to reprocess. The administration deplored the action but set no "red line." North Korea made the plutonium.

The administration also said early this summer that a North Korean test of long-range missiles was unacceptable. North Korea conducted a multiple-launch test of missiles on July 4. Most recently, the administration said a North Korean test of a nuclear bomb would be unacceptable. A week later North Korea conducted its first test.

It appears that the administration is deeply divided on how to deal with North Korea, with some favoring negotiation and others economic and political pressure to force a regime change. As a result, while the administration was willing to send a representative to the six-party talks organized by the Chinese in 2003, it had no apparent strategy for dealing with North Korea there or for providing leadership to the other parties. In the meantime, it increased economic pressure on Pyongyang. Certainly an argument can be made for such pressure, but it would be naive to think it could succeed without the support of the Chinese and South Korean governments, neither of which backs such action. North Korea, sensing the administration's paralysis, has moved ahead with an aggressive and dangerous nuclear program.

So what can be done now that might have a constructive influence on North Korea's behavior? The attractive alternatives are behind us. There should and will be a U.N. resolution condemning the test. The United Nations may respond to calls from the United States and Japan for strong sanctions to isolate North Korea and cut off trade with it. But North Korea is already the most isolated nation in the world, and its government uses this isolation to its advantage. Stronger sanctions on materials that might be of use to the nuclear program are reasonable, but the horse is already out of the barn. Economic sanctions to squeeze North Korea would increase the suffering of its people but would have little effect on the elite. In any event, they would be effective only if China and South Korea fully participated, and they have shown no inclination to do so.

There will be calls to accelerate our national missile defense program. But the greatest danger to the United States from this program is not that North Korea would be willing to commit suicide by firing a missile at the United States, even if it did develop one of sufficient range. Rather, it is the possibility that the North Koreans will sell one of the bombs or some of their plutonium to a terrorist group. The president has warned North Korea not to transfer any materials from its nuclear program. But the warnings we have sent to North Korea these past six years have gone unheeded and its acts unpunished. It is not clear that this latest one will have any greater effect. If a warning is to have a chance of influencing North Korea's behavior it has to be much more specific. It would have to promise retaliation against North Korea if a terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb in one of our cities. It must be backed by a meaningful forensics program that can identify the source of a nuclear bomb.

This test will certainly send an undesirable message to Iran, and that damage has already been done. But it is important to try to keep this action from precipitating a nuclear arms race in the Asia-Pacific region. Both Japan and South Korea have the capability to move quickly to full nuclear-weapon status but have not done so because they have had confidence in our nuclear umbrella. They may now reevaluate their decision. We should consult closely with Japan and South Korea to reassure them that they are still under our umbrella and that we have the will and the capability to regard an attack on them as an attack on the United States. This may be necessary to discourage them from moving forward with nuclear deterrence of their own.

Our government's inattention has allowed North Korea to establish a new and dangerous threat to the Asia-Pacific region. It is probably too late to reverse that damage, but serious attention to this problem can still limit the extent of the damage.

The writer was secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997.

Copyright 2006, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive and The Washington

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Paul Stockton joined CISAC this fall as a senior research scholar, bringing academic and political experience in homeland security policy issues. His research and teaching focus on how U.S. institutions respond to changing threats--especially the rise of terrorism.

As the first researcher CISAC has hired who specializes in homeland security, Stockton will help build the center's research in this area, which is gaining scholarly and public interest.

"Stockton's return to CISAC," where he held a postdoctoral fellowship in 1989-1990, "adds both new depth and breadth to the Center's research on terrorism and homeland security," said Scott Sagan, CISAC director. "He has great practical experience with Congress and national security policy making and in-depth knowledge about how government, military, and private industry forces interact in the homeland security arena."

A former advisor on defense, intelligence, counter-narcotics and foreign affairs to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Stockton also studies interactions between Congress and the president in creating budgets and institutions to address security threats. He is writing an article that explores the congressional response to hurricane Katrina and examines the unresolved challenges that Katrina-scale catastrophes pose to the U.S. disaster response system. He is editing a graduate textbook, Homeland Security, to be published by Oxford in 2007. Stockton will also write a book manuscript analyzing the domestic political constraints that shape homeland security budget and policy decisions, in a work tentatively titled The Politics of Homeland Security.

Stockton came to CISAC from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., where he served as associate provost and directed the school's Center for Homeland Defense and Security. Besides shaping CISAC's research program in homeland security, Stockton, who has PhD in government from Harvard, is co-teaching the center's undergraduate honors program with senior fellow Stephen Stedman.

The Society for the History of Technology has awarded its 2006 Brooke Hindle Fellowship to Sonja Schmid, a CISAC social science research associate and lecturer in Stanford's Program on Science, Technology and Society.

Schmid accepted the $10,000 award at the society's annual conference on Oct. 14. She will use it to support additional research in Russia for a book she is completing on the effects of the Chernobyl disaster on the Soviet and Russian nuclear power industry.

Tentatively titled "Producing Power: The Construction of a Civilian Nuclear Industry in the Soviet Union," the book begins with the Chernobyl explosion of April 26, 1986--"the worst accident at a civilian nuclear facility ever," Schmid notes.

The explosion ignited a fire that burned for more than 10 days and released radioactive materials over a large area of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Some 116,000 people evacuated the area that spring and another 220,000 moved later, according to a 2005 report by a forum the International Atomic Energy Agency convened to assess the accident's economic and health legacies.

The tragedy also resulted in the trial and sentencing of plant operators and "dismissal of the Chernobyl-type reactor design as 'inherently unsafe,'" Schmid explains. Her research examines the development of institutional structures and professional cultures within the Soviet civilian nuclear industry and the history of Soviet reactor design choices.

Schmid has done extensive research in Russian archives that opened after the fall of the Soviet Union. However, "much of this history was never written down," she said, so she also interviewed more than 20 senior nuclear specialists in Russia.

Now filling in details on her largely completed historical analysis, Schmid expects to finish the book manuscript by next summer. The fellowship selection committee called her work "a path-breaking contribution to the field" of technology history. Schmid's "study revises much of what we thought we knew about the development of nuclear power in the Soviet Union," the committee wrote.

On a trip to Russia in September and October 2006, she talked with high-ranking specialists in the Soviet and current Russian nuclear industry, some of whom she met through CISAC visiting professor Siegfried Hecker. A former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Hecker continues to work with Russian scientists in cooperative threat reduction programs to secure former Soviet nuclear materials that could be used for weapons.

A source Schmid has yet to tap is the Archive of the Russian Federal Agency for Nuclear Energy, which maintains records on both military and civilian nuclear programs. The agency "has been publishing excellent series of documents on the history of the Soviet atomic bomb, or the military program," Schmid said, "but their documents on the civilian program so far remain classified." She said she will try again and that on this last visit to Russia she "was encouraged to keep doing so."

Her painstaking research stands to illuminate technological decisions with profound consequences. "While everything about the Chernobyl accident was Soviet--the reactor design, the attitude of operators, the bureaucracy--it shook a system that was designed to be safe," Schmid said. "The system, by its own standards and norms, was normal and perfectly functional," she added.

"Chernobyl is not something that 'could only happen in the Soviet Union,'" Schmid cautioned. "It could happen elsewhere."