CAPE BRETON, Canada – Last October, as long-simmering tensions over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program finally erupted into a full-blown crisis, Colin Powell declared: “They have to eliminate the program, give it up, abandon it, destroy it, whatever words you choose, before they can expect the rest of the world to assist them in their difficulties. … No North Korean child can eat enriched uranium. No North Korean peasant can get a job enriching uranium. It’s fool’s gold.”

Powell is surely correct: proliferation is a self-defeating, twofold folly. In terms of security, as we have clearly seen with India and Pakistan, acquiring weapons of mass destruction merely encourages others to follow suit, gravely increasing regional and global instability.

In terms of resources, as India and Pakistan again illustrate, nothing justifies placing the development of sophisticated means of mass-murder above efforts to remove the unbearable burden of preventable poverty from millions of people.

Both these follies are two sides of the same coin, the fool’s gold of peace through nuclear “strength.” The wider the gulf between the economically powerful and their enormous military might, and the economically exploited and their political powerlessness, the greater the temptation to cross the divide in a single, dramatic, “asymmetric” leap – a massively destructive version of the ghastly “leap of faith” we saw on Sept. 11.

But the logical extension of Powell’s argument extends beyond the twisted logic of Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions. It leads straight down Pennsylvania Avenue, to the White House itself. In whose hands does this useless, impoverishing “gold” – the wasteful wealth of mass destruction – become prudent or acceptable, even a measure of status and power? In Mr. Bush’s wise grasp? Or Mr. Blair’s? Or Mr. Chirac’s? Or Mr. Putin’s? What secret blessing has history or geography bestowed on such a Chosen Few?

Would it be “foolish” for these leaders to renounce their pointless capability to destroy the planet, and instead spend the vast sums locked up in missiles and warheads on men, women and children instead? It is time for them to honor their sworn obligations under international law. All but ignored by the Western press, under the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, from which North Korea is now planning to withdraw, the five nuclear-weapon states named in the accord agreed to negotiate “in good faith” the complete elimination of their arsenals.

The quid pro quo of the NPT is simple: non-nuclear-weapon states agree to stay that way, on condition that the nuclear-weapon states agree to join them, not stay walled-up in their nuclear castles forever. To both their shame and their own harm, India and Pakistan, as well as Israel, refused to sign the treaty, determined to join rather than abolish the nuclear club.

For more than 30 years, however, this simple, mutually beneficial bargain has been scrupulously honored by every other state on earth -with just seven exceptions: the two cheats – Iraq and North Korea – and the five hypocrites – the United States, Britain, Russia, France and China.

Referring to the Iraqi crisis, Powell told reporters last August, “Inspections are not the issue, disarmament is the issue, and making certain that they have no weapons of mass destruction and they did what they were supposed to do but we know they haven’t …”

To many governments around the world, the irony in this self-righteous statement is staggering. For the NPT, as well, in letter and spirit, “disarmament is the issue,” and non-proliferation is a necessary means toward a far greater end. What we are seeing in the Middle East and on the Korean Peninsula is sad proof of the “whole truth” at the heart of the NPT: that in the long-run, non-proliferation and disarmament are two sides of the same coin, the “true gold” of mutual security.

Writing in August 1945, days after two bombs killed 200,000 civilians in Japan, the scientific panel advising Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote, “We believe that the safety of this nation – as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power – cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible. It is our unanimous and urgent recommendation to you that all steps be taken, all necessary arrangements be made, to this one end.”

Those words ring truer today than ever. But now, as then, Midas is not listening.

Sean Howard is editor of Disarmament Diplomacy, published by the Simons Center for Peace and Disarmament Studies at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia, and an adjunct political science professor at the University College of Cape Breton in Canada.