Elsewhere it is claimed that North Korea has also made a deal with Iran for nuclear weapons development. Has Pakistan made other deals? How to put Pandora back in her box?

This deal was also an implicit statement of revolt that reaches beyond local ambitions to confront India or South Korea or to ensure national survival and sovereignty. Selling or transferring nuclear-weapons material and technology to nations that have no connection to your national survival is a significant new development. That is why the key questions about what has happened -- and why -- must be pursued with Pakistan as well as North Korea.

The Bush administration is disinclined to ask President Pervez Musharraf those questions as the war on al Qaeda continues. That is shortsighted. If Pakistan will break the rules to help a distant pauper Asian dictatorship, how can it say no to rich Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia and Libya when they offer to buy an Islamic bomb? If there is no accounting from Pakistan, the major powers' pretense of control over the spread of nuclear weapons is exposed as one more giant fraud of the past heady decade.