John Roughan: Ultimate nightmare looms ever closer

Not quite 10 years ago I was among a number of journalists given a pleasant jaunt by the United States Government to hear its concerns for the security of East Asia and the Pacific.

The Cold War was won, democracy was flowering almost everywhere, the world was booming on sound monetary policies and new technology. Clinton was in power and the expiring century seemed to be correcting the last of its errors, the Balkans, the Middle East, with judicious force and pragmatic diplomacy.

What could we have to worry about, we wondered as we met in Washington and gave ourselves to the tender care of the US Information Service. Within the hour we were listening to a panel discussion on the nuclear ambitions of North Korea.

An emissary of the State Department calmly defended an international agreement, to which New Zealand contributed, giving the Koreans two lightwater reactors on condition they ceased seeking fissionable material. Someone from the Hoover Institute argued that the Korean regime had greeted all previous concessions as a sign of weakness and an encouragement, sooner or later, to raise the stakes. But calm carried the day.

The neo-conservatives could make no headway against the optimism of the times. They would have to cool their heels for a few more years in the think tanks that employ the minds of the party out of power.

We sat in several similar seminars over the next few days. Among the threats posed to us was terrorism. No survey of the security of any part of the world at that time could be complete, it seemed, without a footnote on terrorism.

Insidious, stateless groups, determined to wreak maximum death and destruction for the sake of a political cause, would present perhaps the greatest threat to peace and stability in the first decade of the 21st century. Nobody ever disputed this, but nobody ever discussed it with much interest either.

I often think about that nowadays when we hear of the risk that terrorists might one day acquire a nuclear weapon. Even back then, that was the ultimate nightmare. But still, I think, we don't believe it. If we did, the world would be girding its loins this weekend to do something drastic about North Korea.

That 1997 tour took us eventually to the fiercely armed line across the Korean peninsula that marks the ceasefire in the war fought there more than 50 years ago. There we saw enough to convince me the rulers of the Republic of Korea were seriously mad.

Admittedly, the South Korean sentries at the border post of Panmunjom behave not much better. Soldiers eyeing each other there at a range of perhaps 100m strike a martial-arts stance, fists clenched, fore-arm muscles flexed, or stand half-concealed at the corners of buildings, presenting a half body to the enemy.

The room where the ceasefire was agreed straddles the border and remains preserved as it was, the line painted across the table and the floor. Each side can use the room at different times, which means you can step across the line and claim to have visited North Korea.

The place is more funny than frightening until you start to think about it.

The most chilling thing to me was a neat, new Potemkin village built on a hillside within clear view from the south. Nobody lived in it. It was an eerie, lifeless mockery of existence where every so often a piece of carnival music plays through concealed loudspeakers, the sort of music you might hear for a children's carousel.

The minds that made it now have a nuclear weapon and a seismic shock on Wednesday suggests they have tested it, defying the objections of China, the US, Russia and Japan. The United Nations Security Council looks likely to agree on a cordon to try to stop further weapons material entering or leaving the place, but nothing more.

Thus one more crackpot country has become a nuclear power. As if Pakistan was not enough. The Pakistani scientist who developed his country's bomb, the unscrupulous A.Q. Khan, has supplied Iran and North Korea with the means of uranium enrichment. If Khan would supply Kim Jong-il, he'd supply anybody.

Ten years ago, when wise heads were warning of the scale of terrorism we could face in the 21st century, we knew airlines were terrorists' weapon of choice but never imagined, of course, what happened in 2001.

Only when it happened did we realise we had known something like it had been likely.

Equally likely we will wake up one day to the news that a horror as predictable has happened in New York or London or somewhere similar.

A bomb suspected to be nuclear will have been detonated and the city will be in turmoil. Unknown numbers of people would have been liquidated by heat. Buildings over a radius of several kilometres will be blown out by the blast, many more will be burning in a spreading fireball.

People will be fleeing the city, some still blinded because they were looking in the direction of the flash. Civil defence and news media will be afraid to go under the mushroom cloud. Hundreds of thousands will be dead and millions homeless. Services will be in disarray.

And then world powers will get together and do something about it.

Speakers and writers on security these days commonly cite nuclear proliferation as the greatest threat we face. Senator John Kerry was particularly eloquent on the subject in the last US presidential election and gave an impression an international effort to contain weapons material would have been his urgent priority.

Something drastic is going to be needed but we don't yet believe it any more than we believed in terrorism on September 11, 2001. We live, perhaps blessedly, on experience, not fear.