Why not North Korea?

Fred Kaplan explores this issue of an arms race with North Korea in this excellent article at slate.com.

"The parallel between then and now is not precise. North Korea does not have the resources that the Soviet Union had at the height of the Cold War. But with the deployment of the new missile-defense system, the United States has entered into an arms race with the North Koreans—an arms race we are likely to lose—and nobody in the White House or the Congress seems even to be aware of it."
 
For nearly two years now critics of the Bush administration's policy towards North Korea have tried in vain to point out that of the three members of the "Axis of Evil", Iraq, Iran and North Korea, North Korea by far presents the most immediate threat to the United States in the form of a revamped nuclear weapons program. It's no secret that North Korea would like the ability to gain some leverage over it's Asian neighbors with it's nuclear weapons(and perhaps eventually the ability to threaten the United States.) It's also speculated that North Korea may seek to sell some of it's nuclear weapons technology to other nations that we might not like to see armed with these weapons. Unfortunately our administration seems to think that installing an ABM system in Alaska while avoiding direct negotiations with N. Korea is the best policy for dealing with this threat.

The hawks of course are silent on the issue of nuclear weapons in North Korea. For one it doesn't fit into their grand schemes of remaking the Middle East, and second North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and any military effort to remove them would not nearly be as easy as the invasion of Iraq.

I for one believe only a stiff combination of diplomacy and the threat of action can push North Korea away from the further development of a nuclear weapons program. Our only choice is to make it worth more to them(in food and technical aid)to go without nuclear weapons.