North Korea's Kim Jong Il, 51, wears high-heeled shoes and a bouffant hairdo in an attempt to look taller. He is a poor speaker and worries whether he can match his father's commanding power. But even those who laugh loudest at his vanities take one of his indulgences quite seriously: Kim, who has taken over day-to-day dictatorial duties from his 81-year-old father, "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, appears determined to build a secret arsenal of nuclear weapons. His government had threatened to quit the 150-nation Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons last Saturday; it had ordered all foreigners except diplomats to leave and barred international inspectors from the country. If the outside world resorted to military force, a senior ! official in Pyongyang had warned, it would mean "plunging the whole Korean peninsula into the flame of war."
But at the eleventh hour, North Korea agreed late on Friday to "suspend" its withdrawal from the pact, pulling Asia back from the start of a nuclear arms race. If Pyongyang will permanently rejoin the treaty and agree to inspections, the U.S. is ready to cancel its yearly military exercises with South Korea and make a "no first use" pledge not to initiate the use of nuclear weapons on the peninsula. While U.S. officials are still puzzled by North Korea's actions, they say they now realize how deeply inspections disturbed its closed society.
Even though the cold war is over, leaders like Kim are making the world a more, not less, dangerous place. The superpower standoff that exerted precarious control over the use and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has vanished along with the Soviet empire. North Korea has not only embarked on the road to the bomb, but according to many analysts, it has actually arrived. It reportedly has enough plutonium for at least one nuclear bomb, and it has successfully test-fired a new missile, the 650-mile-range No- Dong I, that could reach beyond South Korea to Japan, China or eastern Russia. Kim's government is an eager peddler of missiles to other countries, and Western analysts fear that Pyongyang could assist other would-be nuclear powers like Iran.
"We are facing a sophisticated Hydra of suppliers," warns CIA Director James Woolsey. More than 25 countries have or may be developing weapons of mass destruction. More than two dozen conduct research in chemical weapons or already stockpile them. More than a dozen have ballistic missiles that could one day loft nuclear warheads far beyond their borders.
Ukraine, along with the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Belarus, stumbled into the nuclear club when the empire crumbled. Although all three have promised to banish the weapons entirely, Ukraine has been wavering on its commitment. A growing number of its leaders regard their atomic arsenal as a bargaining chip to trade for Western aid and security guarantees -- and increasingly as a safeguard against possible Russian aggression that they are loath to relinquish.