The North Korean bomb

The international community has an obligation to act to end the regime of Kim Jong-un, who has become a risk to the rest of the world. About 10 years ago I started reading an exciting book, but gave up reading a few pages because it was, at the same time terrifying. He had written a group of scientists who, after establishing, as far as possible, the number of nuclear weapons that populate the planet He must have increased the number of bombs, explained the possible consequences for the world that, by an act of ideological madness or an accident, these devices of mass destruction began to explode. The numbers were staggering in number of deaths and injuries as air pollution, water, fauna and flora, to the extent that, sooner or later, this process could shed extinguishing all life we live in the sun.

If this is true, and I suppose it is, it is not incomprehensible that a matter as important-the preservation of life-just call public attention too from time to time, for example this week when Kim Jong-un, satrap pathological North Korea announced that held throughout the North Korean people, just popped its first hydrogen bomb? Technicians United States and Europe have been quick to say that this announcement is exaggerated, that the last Stalinist dictatorship in the world has just gotten so far make a nuclear bomb. The United Nations Security Council, the European Union and various governments-including that of China have condemned the experiment (true or false) announced by Kim Jong-un. Will there be new sanctions punishing the North Korean regime? In theory, yes, but practically speaking, no, because that country is in total isolation, as in a test tube, and survives thanks to the iron fist its unhappy citizens slaves, smuggling and delirious demagoguery.

Officially, there are six countries in the world that nuclear weapons the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea and only two of them, the United States and Russia, have experienced hydrogen bombs, which have a destructive capacity seven or eight times greater than the bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only a tenth of already accumulated nuclear arsenal would be enough to kill all the cities of the globe and go to the human species. We should all be very crazy in this world to have reached such a situation without anyone doing anything and continue contemplating, all around us, how nuclear arsenals still there, perhaps increasing, pending that, at any time, some fanatic with the spark to ignite causing the massive explosion that exterminate us.

Some fanatic with power could spark that causes the explosion that exterminate us. I know there are pacifist organizations trying without much success, the rest-mobilize public opinion against this suicidal arms race, and governments and institutions, ritually, they protest every time a new country like Iran until recently, attempts to access the exclusive club of nuclear powers. But the fact is that, so far, disarmament has been mere rhetoric without practical consequences and, starting with the US and Russia, disarmament plans are going nowhere. Deposits of weapons of mass destruction remain there as a permanent announcement of a cataclysm that would end human history.

Should we resign ourselves, waiting for this situation to continue, or you may do something? Yes, it is possible, and we must begin by doing exactly the opposite of what I did 10 years ago with the terrifying book. We must learn from the horror around us and instead of playing ostrich, face it, spread it, to alarm more people with the grim reality so that the pacifist campaigns are no longer eccentric work of minorities and charge a magnitude finally mobilize the governments and operate effective manner to international organizations. None of this is utopian; when there is a strong political will, it is possible to establish a dialogue with the fiercest opponents, as happened with Iran, which has agreed to halt its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions that have crippled its economy.

We must learn from the horror around us and instead of playing ostrich, face it. And if negotiation is impossible? In rare cases this may be true and certainly one of these cases could be the Pyongyang regime. The satrapy of Kim has not only condemned the North Korean people to live in misery, lies and fear. With his frantic pursuit of nuclear weapon, believed, will guarantee survival, threatens its neighbors in the peninsula and the entire Asia. The international community has an obligation to act, putting into action all the means at its disposal to end a regime that has become a threat to the rest of the planet. Even China, which was one of the few supporters of the North Korean dictatorship, seems to have understood the danger to their own survival dementing initiatives Kim Jong-un. And the most effective way to act is to root out the possibility that Pyongyang proceed with a nuclear experiments that are, in the short term, a serious threat to South Korea, China and Japan. The international community can give an ultimatum to the North Korean regime, through the United Nations, giving it accurate to dismantle its nuclear facilities under penalty proceeding to destroy term. And meet the threat should not be heard. I not think there is a clear case where a lesser evil prevails over the risk of causing a catastrophe Pyongyang with hundreds of thousands of victims in Asia and perhaps in the world.

In one of those lucid essays with which the ideological messianism that succumbed to many intellectuals of his time, George Orwell wondered if scientific progress should be celebrated or feared he faced. For these extraordinary advances in knowledge, while have created better conditions of life-in food, health, coexistence, human rights-, have also developed an industry of destruction capable of producing massacres nor imagination sickest of yesteryear could anticipate. Nowadays, the advancement of science and technology has seeded the planet with a deadly devices that, at best, could restore us to the time of the caverns, and, at worst this planet back to that without light remote past when life did not exist yet and was about to emerge, it is not known yet whether for good or ill. I have no answer to this question. But what I will immediately be seeking that book I left unfinished and read this again until the last line.