By Louis Charbonneau
BERLIN, Oct 10 (Reuters) - North Korea's nuclear test has dealt a serious blow to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and analysts say a change in U.S. strategy is needed to avert an arms race that could destroy the benchmark arms control accord.
The NPT, which opened for signature in 1968 and came into force two years later, has three aims -- halting the spread of nuclear weapons, disarmament by countries with atomic arsenals and guaranteeing the right to peaceful nuclear technology.
But the agreement was written during the Cold War, not in the 21st century, where instability in regions like Asia and the Middle East have led some countries to consider going nuclear.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, a former physicist, recently told the European Parliament that one reason the NPT had loopholes is that its authors were not experts.
"I can say that the NPT, which was drafted in 1968, was based on very incomplete knowledge of nuclear technology."
But North Korea's reported nuclear test highlights more than the weaknesses of the pact and the need to repair its loopholes, analysts say. It shows the need for the United States to adopt a less confrontational method for dealing with enemy states.
"North Korea has the bomb. It's not too late with Iran," said Mark Fitpatrick, an arms-control expert at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Iran has aggressively pursued a nuclear enrichment programme that could enable it to produce fuel for atomic weapons and Western countries fear it could follow North Korea's example by choosing the "break-out option" -- develop the ability to produce atom bomb fuel and then withdraw from the NPT.
"The North Korean test is serious threat to the NPT since more countries could follow. Iran is only the first one to mention," said Hans-Joachim Schmidt at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt, a German think-tank.
He said saving the NPT would require "a more cooperative U.S., one which focuses on diplomacy and not force."
"We can see how in Iraq how force has failed," he said.
North Korea signed the NPT in 1985 and withdrew in 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
ASIAN ARMS RACE?
But Iran is not the only threat to the NPT.
In Asia, the key task for Washington will be to launch diplomatic efforts aimed at preventing a regional arms race that would be the death-knell for the NPT, analysts said.
Japan, which sits on massive stocks of plutonium, might decide one day that the U.S. nuclear security umbrella is not a sufficient enough deterrent against North Korea, analaysts said.
South Korea, which admitted in 2004 that it had conducted undeclared uranium enrichment experiments, could follow suit.
"Some people perceive that Japan's new leadership might wish to reconsider Japan's nuclear policy," said George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the U.N.'s Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said countries should support the NPT by ratifying the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which bans all nuclear tests but remains in limbo because Washington refuses to ratify it.
ElBaradei has also urged the creation of an international nuclear fuel bank that would remove the need for states to pursue uranium enrichment and thereby deny them the break-out option that Pyongyang had.
The NPT's 187 signatories met for a month in New York last year but failed to agree on how to reinvigorate the NPT.
Analysts said NPT violations could be reduced if more attention was paid to countries' individual security concerns, thereby removing their perceived need for nuclear arsenals.
"We need more discussion of security problems. North Korea had one -- the strength of the U.S. Iran has the same problem after Iraq," said Schmidt.
Iran insists its nuclear ambitions are peaceful but hid its enrichment programme from the IAEA for nearly two decades.
ElBaradei's predecessor, Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, said it might be easier to persuade countries like North Korea and Iran not to develop nuclear weapons "if all great powers made sincere efforts to move the world toward nuclear disarmament."
Fitzpatrick, a former U.S. State Department official, said Washington should be more willing to talk with states like North Korea and Iran, which Bush said were part of an "axis of evil".
"Many of us believe the U.S. should not have been refusing to talk with North Korea. The U.S. should be willing to negotiate with enemies as well as friends," Fitpatrick said. (Additional reporting by Paul Taylor in Brussels, Dan Williams in Jerusalem and Simon Johnson in Stockholm) (Editing by Dominic Evans; Berlin Newsroom, +49 30 2888 5085))
