But what, pray, is the ‘appropriate’ action? Military action is of course out of question. You don’t attack a nuclear weapons state, for God’s sake! Even if the US and its Western allies resolve to hit the North Korean installations, China will not agree to such a dangerous course of action. China is too close to North Korea for comfort. It’s right to insist military action against North Korea is ‘unimaginable’.

This is something that is not lost on the US and company, that preoccupied with Saddam’s Iraq never took the North Korean threat seriously. Which is why the UN is mulling a draft resolution that proposes strict financial and trade sanctions against the country.

But, truth be told, proposed sanctions are hardly likely to make a terrible difference to the already isolated — and insulated — North Korea. As this newspaper has pointed out in the past, UN sanctions have an uncanny habit of punishing ordinary and innocent people while sparing the powers that be. Iraq is a case in point. Years of sanctions against the country after the first Gulf war resulted in great suffering of Iraqi people including thousands of deaths. Do we want to repeat history in North Korea?

Honestly speaking, the world community has no alternative but live with another nuclear weapons state. After all, we had been living with seven of them all these years. Indeed, it is this paradox that must have forced North Korea to develop the Bomb. Apparently, building the Bomb is the only way for a country to protect itself from big powers with a penchant for regime change. Dangerous logic but nonetheless true.