What are North Korea’s nuclear bombs to the U.S.? They are nothing but toy guns because they are insufficient to threaten America in terms of capacity and means of transport. The North claims it has developed nuclear capabilities as a guarantee against a U.S. attack or threat to its security. But the U.S. said many times it has no such intention. Pyongyang, too, knows that Washington won't attack it, nor has any intention to attack it. Why then did George W. Bush hurry the Feb. 13 agreement and why does he attempt to dress up the questionable result as a success? Bush, who lost in the November mid-term elections, needed the agreement to shift his image from bellicose to conciliatory while engrossing himself in the Iran issue. It's for this reason that he had to cling to a visible outcome, even if that meant scrapping only the nuclear program in progress but leaving nuclear arms and materials from the past untouched. The victims are South Korea and Japan.

American neoconservatives, Bush's ostensible political prop, criticize the agreement because it sets a bad precedent for countries who want to acquire nuclear weapons. The nuclear threat against South Korea does not appear to interest them. Since the Roh Moo-hyun administration begged for an agreement along such lines, Bush will gladly have accepted it.

What do North Korea’s capabilities mean for our republic? They are directly related to our security. If they do not for now target America, what would the North have developed nuclear bombs for, in the face of world censure? Their aim, surely, is to threaten and conquer the South. The North’s repeated threats of war and references to a "sea of fire" and "flames" openly suggest that they can be either actual weapons or means to hold the South's security hostage. Now it is implicitly understood that the North has nuclear arms, amid tacit approval by the U.S. and other countries, North Korea will never dismantle them. The media of the entire world predict it.

Washington seems to regard the Feb. 13 agreement as a momentum for realigning its relationship with South Korea. The U.S. is starting to reveal that it is committed to the protection of South Korea in form only, and that it does not wish to undertake any substantive duties. This should be taken as a roundabout expression of the will to deal with North Korea directly, with China serving as the ledger, without any further need for the headache of going through South Korea. Normalization of ties with the North is already being debated in the U.S. The three-year postponement of the deadline for transferring wartime operational control of our forces to us is only a minor concession made to the South Koreans so the U.S. can leave the existing North Korean nuclear arms and materials intact. The central axis of the Korean problem is moving away from one tripartite structure, of South Korea, the U.S. and Japan, to another: the U.S., China and North Korea.

As far as its own security is concerned, South Korea must search for a new path rather than trusting or relying on the U.S. Since America has decided to seek its own interests and leave the North Korean nuclear arms and materials intact -- or perhaps pretends to do so -- we have to wake up from our delusion. The only way for the Republic of Korea to survive is to look for a way of confronting the North's nuclear devices ourselves. We now stand naked before them. We must accept that we have no genuine friends around us. We cannot be content with the phantom of an American nuclear umbrella.

The presidential election in late December should be an occasion for the people to debate the North's nuclear capabilities and our security problem more seriously than at any time in the past. We must avert a situation where the country, led by the president and his associates without public debate or consensus, remains a sucker that gives away money and goods to North Korea while our security hangs in the balance. In this, the people are quite rudderless: no presidential contender has yet recognized the seriousness of our serious situation and raised our security crisis as their top priority.