These sorts of activities can no longer be either ignored or tolerated. While the United States is going to have to pick its shots, it must now adopt the sort of strategy Ronald Reagan employed to destroy the Soviet Union: A concerted campaign aimed at cutting off the funding to, neutralizing the threat from and de-legitimating a hostile regime. Elements of such a campaign would include the following:

Joining with Japan, Australia and others who share our view of the danger posed by North Korea to deny Pyongyang the financial life-support it must have to survive. International corporations operating in the North should be given a choice: Do business with Kim or with the Free World. Those who opt for the former should be denied government contracts, subjected to financial sanctions and import controls and made the focus of divestment initiatives like that which ultimately brought down the South African regime twenty years ago.

Greatly ramping up the U.S. effort to deploy the sort of effective anti-missile defenses first sought by Mr. Reagan in 1983. Thanks to President Bush's leadership, the United States now has the latitude to protect its people against ballistic missile attack. To date, unfortunately, the effort to do so has mostly been confined to a limited, land-based missile defense system. In light especially of the North Korean threat, we need to augment that deployment immediately by modifying the Navy's Aegis fleet air-defense ships with the capability to shoot down ballistic missiles of various ranges - whether launched from places like North Korea or from tramp steamers off our coasts.

In addition, now that the North Koreans have joined the Indians and Pakistanis in demonstrating that our restraint in nuclear testing is not preventing others from doing such experimentation, we need to resume the sort of periodic underground tests essential to ensuring that our deterrent remains as safe, reliable and credible as we can make it. President Reagan strenuously argued that such testing is a non-negotiable requirement. We can no longer responsibly persist in the moratorium on nuclear testing we have observed since 1992.

Finally, the United States must stop pretending that Kim Jong-Il's regime is one with which we can live. Rather than legitimating the regime by negotiating with it - even in multilateral settings, to say nothing of bilateral ones, every effort should now be bent towards discrediting this odious dictatorship, making pariahs of those who perpetuate it and encouraging freedom throughout the Korean peninsula.

President Reagan demonstrated that the peoples enslaved by the Soviet superpower need not be consigned to such a state in perpetuity. So in our time we must bend every effort to ending the tyrannical misrule of the nuclear club's newest, and arguably most dangerous, member: Kim Jong-Il.