WASHINGTON — Early in his first term, President Barack Obama conducted some quick triage on how his administration would face a gamut of nuclear challenges: Focus on stopping Iran's nuclear program before it succeeded in building a weapon, but do not waste a lot of energy trying to roll back a North Korean program that had already built a small arsenal that the desperately poor country had little incentive to give up.
It was a pragmatic roll of the dice. While it will be years before the strategy's long-term wisdom can be assessed, Iran, eager to have economic sanctions lifted, shipped 98 percent of its known stockpile of nuclear fuel to Russia last week, most likely crippling its ability to build a weapon over the next decade.
But the North Koreans have a way of acting out when they feel ignored. The detonation that rocked Northeast Asia Wednesday morning and Pyongyang's claim to have set off its first hydrogen bomb — a boast there is good reason to treat with skepticism — is a reminder that the North Koreans have been on something of an atomic spending spree while U.S. negotiators were cloistered in Vienna striking deals with the Iranians.
As both outside nuclear experts and U.S. intelligence officials have been warning in classified and unclassified briefings for more than a year, North Korea's small nuclear arsenal now seems on the verge of turning into a good-size one. Estimates vary, but many believe the arsenal could contain more than 20 weapons by the end of this year. Siegfried S. Hecker, the former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the man the North Koreans have periodically allowed into their most secret facilities to convince Washington of their prowess, last year termed that "a hell of a lot of bombs."
Meanwhile, North Korea has improved both the range and mobility of its missiles, making them harder to deter — or take out if the North Korean regime collapses or decides to go out in a suicidal blaze of glory. Senior U.S. military officials have periodically offered public assessments that the North probably now has the ability to shrink a nuclear weapon to a size small enough to fit atop one of those weapons, meaning the world's most unpredictable regime could credibly threaten South Korea, Japan, U.S. forces in the Pacific and, eventually, the West Coast of the United States. The only saving grace is that in many missile tests over the past few years, the North Koreans have repeatedly demonstrated pretty lousy aim.
If the North Koreans really have mastered the engineering of a thermonuclear weapon, it would marginally increase the severity of that threat. But politically, it renews a question: What do you do with a problem like North Korea?
United Nations Security Council resolutions — the council is expected to meet Wednesday in response to the latest test — clearly have little effect. And hopes that the North Korean government will collapse have proved fantasy so far: If Kim Jong Un is still in office on Jan. 20, 2017, the Kim family dynasty — grandfather, father and son — will have outlasted a dozen U.S. presidents.
But what the Obama administration has advertised as "strategic patience" — not overreacting to every North Korean test and demand for a payoff while continuing pressure through sanctions until the North agrees to negotiate — may well be judged by administration critics as having paved the way for a Pakistani-sized arsenal.
"Strategic patience has led to acquiescence," Robert Litwak of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the author of "Outlier States: American Strategies to Change, Contain, or Engage Regimes," said Wednesday. "What a contrast to the effort and creativity the administration put into the Iranian case."
It is not as if the administration was doing nothing. Sydney A. Seiler, the State Department's coordinator for eliminating the North Korean nuclear program, put together a package of proposals to see if the North would consider resuming negotiations. It was intended to be a lot like the secret diplomacy that led to the two-year-long formal negotiations with Iran.
But it went nowhere, and South Korean officials have warned for a long time that the North's program has hit what one called a "point of no return," a phrase the Israelis once used, wrongly, about Iran.
Still, even some former Obama administration officials believe the administration's insistence that it would not talk to North Korea unless it agreed the ultimate outcome was complete nuclear disarmament was a prescription for diplomatic failure. Stephen W. Bosworth, Obama's first special envoy for North Korea, who died over the weekend, advocated in recent years that an administration willing to talk to Iran, Cuba and Myanmar had little to lose in dealing with the starving, isolated North Koreans.
"Whatever risks might be associated with new talks, they are less than those that come with doing nothing," Bosworth wrote in The New York Times in 2013 with Robert L. Gallucci, the former North Korea negotiator in the Clinton administration. "Pyongyang's nuclear stockpile will continue to expand, the North will continue to perfect its missile delivery systems, the danger of weapons-of-mass-destruction exports will grow, and the threat to U.S. allies will increase.
From Pyongyang's viewpoint, there is little incentive to give up the nuclear arsenal. The world is not exactly banging on North Korea's door to do business the way it wants to resume relations with Iran: The North has no oil, no striving middle class, and little strategic value in the modern world. Its greatest power is the threat it poses to one of the most prosperous corners of the globe.
But it is also considered by many too dangerous to allow North Korea to fail. The Chinese know that if it ceases to exist, the South Koreans, and their U.S. allies, will be on the Chinese border. The South Koreans know that if a conflict breaks out, the North will lose — but only after Seoul, just 35 miles or so from the North Korean border, is a smoking ruin.
So the North Korean strategy is to up the ante, and hope the world will acknowledge it as a nuclear weapons power that has to be dealt with. H-Bomb or no H-bomb, nuclear weapons are the country's insurance policy, and the test was a sign that it has no intention of cashing it in.