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National Intelligence Service director Kim Seung-kyu on Monday told the National Assembly’s Intelligence Committee that North Korea is always ready to conduct a nuclear test if Kim Jong-il so decides. Lawmakers on the committee also quoted Kim as saying the chances that it will are 50:50.

Everyone knows this government rates the chances of any North Korean provocation low. In July, when the entire international community was alerted to the North's impending missile tests, a key government official said it wasn’t missiles but a satellite the North was preparing to launch. If even this government thinks there is half a chance of a nuclear test, the situation must be grave indeed.

If Pyongyang goes ahead with the nuclear test, the nuclear threat against our security would increase from "potential" to "practical." It is crystal clear that Japan would use it as an excuse to rush into turning itself into a military power, and that China would accelerate its own military buildup to counter Japan's rearmament. If North Korea's missile tests were a drizzle, to coin a phrase, its nuclear test will be a tempest.

The frail vessel of independent defense this government says it will launch could not navigate the waves a North Korean nuclear test would cause. To continue navigating without capsizing, our country must fasten itself tight to the alliance with the U.S. But the government is instead hastening our sole exercise of wartime operational control of our troops, which will inevitably result in the dissolution of Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command.

The government insists on dismantling the nation's security structure while acknowledging that the North may well be about to conduct a nuclear test; the reason must be one of two. Either it is the belief that the North's nuclear weapons will never ever target the South so there is no need to worry. That logic calls for entrusting our security to the goodwill of the same North Korean regime that turned the country into a sea of blood five decades ago. The other is a mindset that doesn’t see much wrong with turning our country over to North Korea. A nation that entrusts this government with its security lives dangerously.