The recent developments in North Korea prompted me to dust-off (or virtually dust-off) this column from 2003 by Charles Krauthammer. Some of the details have changed but basically we’ve still got the same terrible hand we did in 2003 and as Krauthammer wrote then:

What to do when your hand is so poor? Play the trump. We do have one, but we dare not speak its name: a nuclear Japan. Japan cannot long tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea. Having once lobbed a missile over Japan, North Korea could easily hit any city in Japan with a nuclear-tipped weapon. Japan does not want to live under that threat.
We should go to the Chinese and tell them plainly that if they do not join us in squeezing North Korea and thus stopping its march to go nuclear, we will endorse any Japanese attempt to create a nuclear deterrent of its own. Even better, we would sympathetically regard any request by Japan to acquire American nuclear missiles as an immediate and interim deterrent. If our nightmare is a nuclear North Korea, China’s is a nuclear Japan. It’s time to share the nightmares.

Let’s give China a timetable for Japan’s nuke acquisition and see if they can’t get the North Koreans to play ball.