A single bulb dangles in the living room window of most every North Korean apartment. With buildings stacked in rows next to unlit streets, the obscure nighttime cityscape leaves the gray daytime scenery to the imagination.

Power outages are common, since an aging infrastructure with dwindling efficiency can barely squeeze juice through to the buildings that need it. Elevators shut down unexpectedly as hydroelectric facilities that are supposed to supply them have failed routinely since heavy flooding in 1996.

Coal supply, which provided about 83% of North Korea's primary energy consumption in 2003, is a stunted industry, operating well below capacity and suffering from barely functional railroads.

A population of 23 million is kept busy with festivals and military parades, all of which extol the regime of 64-year-old Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung.

Meanwhile, 2% GDP growth is the yearly trend, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, one of the last bastions of old-school dogmatic Marxism, gives new meaning to the term "welfare state."

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Since 2000, as part of the South Korean "Sunshine Policy" of economic engagement with the North, the DPRK has sought to import electricity across the DMZ through a linked North-South grid. But if the North's end is as decrepit as it seems, whatever watts are pushed across the frontier will mostly be wasted.

In any case, the Republic of Korea (South) never signed off on any such cooperation charter, and the North is maintained primarily by the grace of its one true ally, China.

North Korea is on state welfare.

Kim would do well to worry more about why that is, and take China's advice on adapting the socialist system to market realities.

Or maybe North Korea should take a page from Iran's book!

An Unhappy Medium

To the credit of Iran's Council of Guardians, Ahmedinejad, and the rest of the Tehran regime, they are at least attempting to play the civilian energy card.

Iran has always maintained that it intends to enrich uranium for peaceful use. When the BBC reported this week that Iran had expressed sympathy for North Korea's nuclear weapons breakthrough, an Iranian official wrote an angry letter to London saying that Iran is opposed to the use of nuclear weapons in any case.

That is very smart of Iran, and sets a more favorable basis for negotiations. Russia has achieved at least some progress in persuading Iran to allow uranium enrichment on Russian soil on Iran's behalf. But that will not be acceptable in the end for a country that wants to maximize its oil output and depend little on outsiders for economic health.

North Korea, on the other hand, skipped straight to nuclear fission for belligerent use, taking little time to tout the potential boon to the populace and breaking a 1994 bilateral framework agreement with the US that would have allowed some access to peacefully foreign-produced nuclear material.

Monday's subterranean blast backed North Korea's interlocutors (of which there are many, given the current Chinese-led six-party talks) into a defensive corner.

China and Japan teamed up Sunday to make an extremely rare joint statement warning the DPRK against testing any weapon that may harm regional stability. For China, especially, stability is the word as that country's economy surges. Most observers even doubt that China would do anything to forcibly unite Taiwan with the mainland.

Beijing would always rather engage in soft diplomacy, using aid as both positive and negative reinforcement, but only rarely as the latter.

Kim slapped Chinese President Hu Jintao and Japanese PM Shinzo Abe like they were two of the Three Stooges. As they stood lined up, he enjoyed the "thwack" of his palm against their surprised faces.

And they felt the sting.

Energy Is a Weapon

China now supplies North Korea with 70% of its food and fuel aid, without which the country could not survive. After the USSR collapsed, Kim lost his primary ideological and financial sponsor, as well as subsidized energy deliveries.

Famine killed millions of North Koreans in the 1990s following the Soviet fall. How many more would die if China cut the umbilical cord?

It doesn't look like Beijing will sever ties completely, primarily because an exodus from the stricken DPRK would mean an influx into neighboring China.

Regime change is also not in the cards, and if there is too much pressure on the NK government in Pyongyang, we cannot trust Kim to hold back all his weaponry while the ship goes down.

If Pyongyang falls, it will take Seoul with it. If the lights go out in Pyongyang because Beijing flipped the switch, who knows what plans will hatch in the darkness? The glowing radioactive light by which Kim's scientists are currently working sets no one at ease.

What unconventional weapon can be used to cool Kim down? As is so often the case these days, energy is the answer.

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