Afterward, one senior Western diplomat quoted in the New York Times stated that "The international community has a whole different look today than it did a year ago," referring to atomic arms programs in North Korea and Iran as being "at the center of attention" now. (Well hello there, Mr. or Ms. Anonymous Diplomat, congratulations on waking up to reality at last!)

The IAEA called for a new round of rigorous, invasive inspections in Iran. The Iranian representative at this meeting replied in most undiplomatic terms: "The language of force and threat will be futile." The ground-truth here, independent of any spin or selective misperception out of Washington or London, is that UN inspectors were recently shocked at the advanced progress of Iran's weapons-oriented uranium purification program -- and Iran has flatly denied these same impartial observers access to many sites on their "must see" list.

Simultaneously, the U.S. and other nations began to clamp down on North Korean dual-use-tech imports and illegal-drug exports, to weaken that regime and slow its own burgeoning nuke arms program. Pyongyang's answer to this was equally incorrigible: Any naval blockade would be treated as an act of war. Retaliation would be brutal and swift. Japan, a conveniently close and exposed target, was threatened with becoming a "sea of fire," a lurid image previously applied by the North to South Korea's capital, Seoul. The worst thing is, current international law is partly on North Korea's side: A naval blockade against a country is indeed an act of war.

Talk alone won't do it, but we still need to give talk a chance. We also need to think with utter crystal clarity about how and when to go beyond talk and diplomacy, to go beyond blockades alone -- to assemble and use as needed a versatile spectrum of armed force. Call it "flexible response," in this unstable era of New Age Nukes and hardened underground bunkers intentionally deeper that our conventional munitions can reach.

Until recently, such clear thinking seemed almost impossible. The enemies we faced on the nuclear front ranged all over the map: their location, their ideology, and the status of their building or buying one or more working fission bombs. But with enough time and experience under our belts now, a sensible framework does emerge out of what once seemed a confusing, fragmented hodgepodge in this deadly race against the clock.

Ideology: What do a secular Arab state (Iraq under Saddam), a fundamentalist Islamic nation (Iran under extremist mullahs), a neo-Stalinist ultra-closed society (North Korea), and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have in common? For our discussion purposes, the answer is simple: Nothing. Ideology is the wrong question. The right question is motivation. Motivation Level fits along a numerical scale to guide our actions and reactions:

0. No interest in obtaining nukes, let alone ever using them.

1. Largely benign desire for global and at-home prestige, as a de facto member of the exclusive worldwide Nuclear Club.

2. Possession of nukes as a cry for help, for serious attention and foreign aid, with the weapon or weapons used as a bargaining chip. Occasional saber-rattling to emphasize the point.

3. Perception of genuine internal/external threats to the existing regime, with belief in need for a nuclear umbrella to assure immunity from outside attack. Use of said umbrella, once acquired, for psychological ascendancy over neighbors.

4. Aggressive intent, with the driving desire to do America (the late Ayatollah Khomeini's "Great Satan") or Israel or other foes the maximum bodily harm -- while having the aggressor's leaders hide and escape any personal retribution.

5. Willingness -- even eagerness -- to provoke massive H-bomb retaliation for the use of a New Age Nuke in an actual detonation against the U.S. homeland or allies and interests abroad, to destabilize the entire world while turning the aggressor nation (or terrorist host country) into the ultimate "Martyr State."

On this scale, North Korea might rate a 2 or a 3; ditto for present-day Iran. Al Qaeda might get a solid (and frightening) 5. But North Korea and Iran might both, for their own peculiar reasons, now or soon rate a 4, which means the desire to launch an atomic first-strike. In my opinion, it seems self-evident that a current 4 or 5 requires drastic preventive/pre-emptive measures using conventional and unconventional force. The latter should include ground-penetrator tactical nukes, to hold at risk (for a 4) or obliterate ASAP (for a 5) the enemy commanders with authority to order detonation of fission weapons. States in the 1 through 3 range can be dealt with best by diplomatic and economic means -- with stronger measures, as just described, on hand to deter their elevation to Motivation Level 4 or 5. The fact is, a hostile regime at "only" a level 3 can be very problematic, as Kim Jong Il and his cronies in North Korea show.

There's another dimension to the categorizing of various New Age nuclear threats: their progress along the path to acquiring one or more working weapons. Again, studying Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, and looking back on the early Cold War plus the arms race between India and Pakistan, a calibration scale also suggests itself for Acquisition Level in today's Third World:

0. No capability to build atomic bombs, beyond book-knowledge of nuclear physics from unclassified reference sources.

1. Early efforts to acquire nuclear weapon capabilities through outside aid, via rogue scientists or willing national-level suppliers like Russia and France or their business corporations.

2. Advanced stages of completing reactors to make plutonium, and/or purification plants to make weapons-grade uranium, but with inadequate quantities of fissile metal (bomb fuel) actually stockpiled to make a bomb without further outside help.

3. Independence from foreign assistance in creating one or more critical masses of fissile metal and weapon detonation gear.

4. Possession of one or more complete, deliverable atom bombs.

It seems that on this scale, and again fully separate from U.S. or UK intelligence claims, Iraq at the time of Gulf War II rated a 1, Iran is now a 2 or a 3, while North Korea is both a 3 and a 4: North Korea is reliably known to possess two working atomic bombs, and is hurrying as well to manufacture more. (Note that a rogue state or terror group might jump straight from a 0 to an imminent-danger 4, by buying a black-market nuke, smuggled maybe out of Russia -- or sold, as threatened, by Pyongyang.)

Rogue state regime-heads may enjoy varying levels of popular support. Terrorist groups may be dispersed globally into willing and/or unwilling-unwitting host countries. I suggest, only partly tongue in cheek, that perhaps we need a new acronym to articulate the commonality between them all as nuclear threats: RDPs, for Really Dangerous Persons. Clearly, the U.S. needs to minimize the number of RDPs at Acquisition Level 3 or 4. One clue to how to do this is to break their chain of advance up the scale from 0. This won't be easy, since RDPs have already shown their skill at using ambiguity, denial, and America's own free-society heated dialogue and political debate as tools for the bad guys to delay and evade intervention and gain more time.

Al Qaeda and the surviving two-thirds of the Axis of Evil present distinct microcosms in which to develop, test, and deploy effective countermeasures against different types of RDPs.

North Korea poses to the U.S. and nations in the region needs for defense by land, by sea, and by air. North Korea borders South Korea (and China and Russia too); Japan lies several hundred miles across an open sea. Others have said this before: We require much greater intelligence into North Korean society. The CIA, the NSA, all Special Forces, and our spy satellites and recon aircraft/drones have their work cut out for them. But we also have at hand an ideal, high-priority arena in which to test our latest theater ABM (anti-ballistic missile) systems, including interceptor anti-missile missiles, and airborne high-power chemical lasers to destroy both ballistic and cruise missiles. Furthermore, we need a continuous undersea warfare presence. Submarines can maintain signals intercepts while also hunting RDP diesel subs and smuggler vessels, helping vector surface warships or helicopters to search for no-no cargoes. A constant AWACS presence, with fighters and bombers on short alert on carriers and on airfields, complete this New Age Nuke forward-deployed, joint and combined defensive diad. The diad pokes big holes in a Motivation Level 3 or 4 RDP's own nuclear umbrella, compromising its ability to deliver a first strike or play survivable blackmail games. With nuclear scarcity, "Use it and lose it" applies, imposing strong self-restraint against depleting Pyongyang's tiny A-bomb arsenal.

Besides, a weapon that can't survive the journey from storage depot to launch platform to final impact on target becomes essentially impotent. The security and preparations needed for state-owned nukes make them conspicuous and vulnerable prior to launch. A SEAL's .50-caliber sniper rifle could neutralize the warhead with one shot from a mile away, making it at worst a local "dirty bomb" on some opponent's military base.

RDP terrorists can communicate across borders via cell phones or e-mail while speaking in code. But fissile metal needs physical transport. Adequately shielding the signature neutrons and gamma rays, against the latest radiological detectors in friendly hands, calls for a package so big and heavy it makes the container quite an attention-grabber if it's seen. Frontiers and harbors and airports worldwide must be thoroughly "wired" with detectors and trained personnel. Suspicious ships must be boarded and searched many miles from land, with all the tracking infrastructure such interdiction requires. This homefront aspect of New Age Nuke defense cannot be neglected on the R&D side, nor shortchanged when setting acquisition budgets. Such neglect would forfeit our major advantage of Asymmetric Assured Destruction (AAD), that big sea change from the Cold War's MAD.

In the case of Iran, George W.'s announced "Zero Tolerance" followed by Iran's diplomatic "Screw you" may be just-cause enough for Special Forces or air strikes to dismantle nuclear weapon-related facilities the RDPs in Iran won't dismantle voluntarily -- using conventional high-explosive munitions as legitimate, proportional response. Now or soon might be the time to show the world what a MOAB can do -- against some desert facility, possibly after a brief warning for the staff to evacuate. Tehran beware! Our commander in chief's declaration that we have no plans at this time to invade Iran could be a red herring. A precision air strike is not an invasion; the White House and Pentagon may be playing the ambiguity card themselves while regrouping from high tempo ops around Iraq and Afghanistan.

North Korea should also be asking themselves, is open admission they violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as far back as 1994 excuse enough for us to declare their weapons program to be international contraband, and neutralize that contraband quickly by any means available? They've cited the laws of war at us obnoxiously about blockades. Let's cite some law right back in their faces, hard. They might see reason then.

Iraq as a pre-emptive conflict, as imperfect as war always is -- including faulty intelligence and controversial homefront propaganda just as in WW II and even the War of 1812 -- establishes a precedent that should make state-level RDP regimes proceed with the greatest caution and stop acting provocatively. And the bigger a footprint, whether garrisons or covert ops, that we establish on terrorist or terror-supporter stomping grounds, the safer we'll all be. The troops needed to do this deserve our highest possible level of appreciation and help; their task now is longer on gore than on glory. More people will die or be maimed, but 3,000 innocents died on 9/11/01 because our country sat blind and unprepared -- 300,000 or more civilians might die in a day from one successful WMD attack.

Pre-emption, whether with tactical ground-penetrator nukes or conventional emerging high-tech weapons, will probably increase bad feelings toward the U.S. in other parts of the globe. But would this be so terrible, if survival of countless Americans is at stake? Throughout the multi-decade Cold War, half the world hated our guts, yet we came through intact as a nation -- a bigger, stronger, thriving nation at that. Looking back with maybe unfair hindsight, it seems that the vaunted post-Cold War "peace dividend" was an optical illusion. It's vital now for all of us to get real about the ongoing threats the USA must confront, and about the heavy costs of true security.

In the final installment of this "New Age Nukes" miniseries, I'll invite you to wargame with me a New Age nightmare scenario: Suppose, suddenly, an RDP's atom bomb goes off on American soil.

To be continued ...

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com