The American people are really having focus problems. North Korea and Iran are trying desperately to join the nuclear club, and North Korea has just detonated some kind of nuclear device under its troubled, starving soil. Meanwhile, we debate endlessly whether Dennis Hastert should resign as speaker of the House of Representatives because of a rogue congressman who has resigned in disgrace.

Is there nothing that will shake us out of our frivolity? The Foley-page scandal is serious, of course, but we all know there have been sex scandals before and there will be sex scandals again, and the republic will endure. If this one didn't involve the Internet and gay sex, it wouldn't be gripping our national attention. Remember, we were obsessing over our last congressional sex scandal, Gary Condit and Chandra Levy, just before 9-11-2001.

We need to focus. This is way more serious than the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. This is Armageddon.

The world is facing a historically unprecedented test of its collective moral courage. Two rogue states are knocking at the door of nuclear capability. They must be stopped - collectively if possible, unilaterally if necessary. From Aug. 9, 1945 (Nagasaki) until today, Oct. 15, 2006, an elapsed time of 61 years, two months, five days, 11 hours and 59 minutes, the nations that have possessed nuclear weapons have chosen not to use them in battle. On a couple of occasions, the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the Korean War (1950-53), we held the match close to the fuse, but something fundamentally good in our character made us back away from the brink.

Only 10 percent of the world's population is over 60 years old. That means that almost everyone is too young to remember where they were at the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or even the Cuban Missile Crisis. The lessons we learned at Alamogordo, N.M. (July 16, 1945), and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are being forgotten.

The father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, knew this moment would come, when the world's visceral memory of the apocalyptic horror of nuclear warfare would fade to nothing, and that angry, ambitious or desperate nations would have enough distance on Hiroshima to regard nuclear war as a viable option. In the fall of 1945, Oppenheimer said, "If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the name of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish."

If Iran and North Korea get nuclear bombs, all bets are off. Their constitutions do not contain enough checks and balances to insure that they will make rational choices. There is not enough public debate in North Korea or Iran to bring collective Jeffersonian wisdom to their acts of national expression in the global arena. I do not believe they belong to some "axis of evil." But I do believe they are unstable regimes presided over by megalomaniacs who believe they have special access to God. (I felt a cheap shot surfacing here, but I suppressed it.)

If Iran and North Korea were responsible non-Western nations, skeptical of American power, but nevertheless reliable members of the world community, who wanted nuclear weapons for the same reason we do - to have a gigantic weapon of last resort to deter terminal aggression from the outside - we'd probably have to let them create small arsenals. If Spain or New Zealand sought to go nuclear today, we'd try to talk them out of it, but we wouldn't threaten air strikes or regime change. But Iran and North Korea are unquestionably unreliable and by their own public admission irresponsible.

The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has said that Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth. It would take more than one nuclear bomb to accomplish that, but it wouldn't take 100. As long as that is the foreign policy of Iran, and indeed for a long probationary period afterward, the world must not allow it to have a nuclear weapon. Nuclear weapons can only be permitted to those who can reasonably be expected not to use them. President Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden can cry foul if they want, can accuse us of gross hypocrisy, but they have not behaved in a way that would bring us to let them have a nuclear weapon. It's that simple.

North Korea is arguably worse than Iran, for Iran at least operates by a rationale that has a kind of dark logic to it. Korea is just toying with pandemonium.

Unite or perish, said Oppenheimer.

The question is, does the First World have the collective will to stop Iran and North Korea? France, Russia, China and other nations may be disillusioned with American power and arrogance, and they may look with secret glee on anything that knocks the U.S. down a peg or two, but this is not the moment to settle such trivial scores. Any First World nation that does not get it that this is one of the defining moments of the 21st century, one of the defining moments of the history of industrial humanity, is ignoring a truth as hard as a nugget of uranium. This is one of those very few moments in modern history when the advanced nations of the world must swallow their differences and do whatever it takes to prevent the unspeakable from happening.

If they weren't making apocalyptic threats to everyone around them, the Islamic nationalists would have a reasonable argument. The only nation ever to use these weapons of mass destruction was the United States. (So, they ask, the United States gets to moralize about who else should have the bomb?) Islam has good reason to fear the United States. Given America's nearly blind support of Israel, its insistence on extracting all the oil it wishes from the Middle East (the Carter Doctrine), and its new doctrine of preventative strike (witness the demolition of Iraqi society), any Middle Eastern government has to contemplate the possibility of an American invasion or occupation.

Their view is that the United States and its lackeys roll over the Islamic world whenever it suits us and that it is not out of the question that we will eventually overthrow the Iranian regime (as we did in 1953), occupy the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, attack Syria, and prop up and reinstall if necessary a pro-American dictatorship in Pakistan.

If we are, in some sense, witnessing a historic clash of civilizations, Islam versus Christendom, and Christendom has the bomb and Islam (except for the pro-American Pakistan) doesn't, the mullahs' demand for an "Islamic bomb" makes perfect sense. If I were a citizen of Egypt or Syria, watching news reports of American military action in my regional homeland, I'd want nuclear weapons. Wouldn't you? If radical Islam had troops and missile launchers stationed in Mexico and Manitoba, we'd do whatever it took to get them out of the Western Hemisphere, wouldn't we? Why is it so crazy for Islamic nationalists to loathe American military presence in their homeland, indeed in their holy land, and to seek a weapon that will make us think twice or 200 times twice?

The hypocrisy argument cannot be dismissed. This crisis comes at a time when American prestige in the world - even among our closest allies - is at an all-time low. Our closest friends don't really trust us any more, and a significant majority of the world's people would rank us as the nation most likely to use nuclear weapons, partly because our own defense planners have been fantasizing about how they might be employed in the current world crisis. If we want the world to grant us any moral authority in this grave moment, we must start by showing that we understand what's at stake. We ought to unilaterally reduce our nuclear stockpile by 25 percent and invite every other member of the nuclear club to follow suit, beginning with Israel.

We can begin with the ICBM missiles that still disgrace the wheat-producing soils of North Dakota.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. Jenkisnon lives in Bismarck. E-mail him at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)