where they take you to another place. In Miami it was a bit bigger and with this grid through which you could see a little piece of the sky. You could tell if it was day or night. There we were 23, sometimes 24, hours a day, inside those four small walls, with nothing to do. It's very difficult from a humane point of view. And many people couldn't take it. You could see them start to lose their minds, start screaming."

Having set North Korea's barbarity in a larger perspective, let us turn to the dangers its testing programme and intermittent detonations pose to world security.

On May 25, North Korea conducted its second underground nuclear test, two-and-a-half years after its first. Obama promptly denounced it as "a grave threat to the peace and stability of the world". He added that North Korea's actions had "flown in the face of United Nations resolutions" and were inviting deeper international isolation.

Almost four months earlier, Obama had nothing to say when, on February 3 or 4, two nuclear-powered submarines, one British, one French, each carrying nuclear missiles, collided in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Unlike the North Koreans, who immediately reported their test to the world, Britain and France said nothing. Neither did the United States. The three Nato powers hoped that this indubitable threat to world safety would remain a secret.

On February 16, the Sun was the first paper to disclose the crash. Then, and only then, an anonymous British official said the submarine Vanguard's "deterrent capability remained unaffected and there was no compromise to nuclear safety". The question of what either sub was supposed to be deterring was not addressed.

France's Defence Ministry said in a brief statement on February 6 that the sub Le Triomphant had struck "a submerged object (probably a container)" during a return from a patrol, damaging the sonar dome on the front of the submarine. The Ministry did not confirm the date of the collision, and didn't mention the British sub.

The Vanguard limped back to home port, considerably dented, according to observers. Le Triomphant, blind because of the damage to its sonar dome, was escorted by a frigate back to its base on France's west coast. There is no reason to believe a single word of either the British or French governments' accounts of the crash.

Sarkozy's first speech on 'defence' after he became president came with the dedication of Le Triomphant's sister sub, Le Terrible, and a threat to nuke Iran. Tony Blair closed out his decade as prime minister by announcing a new series of nuclear subs to carry the Trident nukes. He singled out North Korea for specific mention.

"No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons," Obama declared piously in Cairo, even as he told Iran that "when it comes to nuclear weapons, we have reached a decisive point" and as his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, went on ABC TV to talk murkily about "consequences and costs" if Iran developed nuclear weapons, and then stumbled through a hypothesis about a US attack, even "a first strike".

And they call North Korea a rogue nation?