There is a particular brand of ennui that sets in when one realizes the apocalypse has become a mundane line item in a regional budget report. We are once again forced to look toward the 38th parallel, where the world’s most persistent hereditary cult continues to play with the spicy rocks that the rest of the ‘civilized’ world pretended to lock away decades ago. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, in a display of performative alarm that has become the standard greeting for any new year in Seoul, has informed us that North Korea is now churning out enough nuclear material for ten to twenty warheads annually. It is, quite frankly, the only industry in the North that actually functions, proving that while you can’t feed a population with a command economy, you can certainly facilitate their collective vaporizing with remarkable industrial efficiency.

The math is as depressing as it is predictable. Since the first test in 2006—an event that the United Nations met with the diplomatic equivalent of a tut-tut and a wagging finger—the Kim regime has transitioned from a geopolitical nuisance into a legitimate manufacturer of mass extinction. President Lee’s warning that these weapons will soon go ‘abroad’ is the ultimate satirical punchline to the neoliberal dream of globalization. We wanted an interconnected world; we got one where the most volatile components of physics are treated like overstock inventory at a liquidation sale. The idea of a nuclear ‘global danger’ is framed as a new revelation, as if the prospect of radioactive isotopes drifting across borders was previously a localized, boutique concern for the unlucky residents of the Korean Peninsula.

Let’s deconstruct the sheer, unadulterated stupidity of the global response. For nearly two decades, the ‘international community’—that mythical collection of bureaucrats who believe a strongly worded resolution has the physical properties of a lead shield—has watched this train wreck in slow motion. The Right will scream for more sanctions, which is essentially trying to starve a regime that has already mastered the art of starving its own people for fun and profit. The Left will call for ‘dialogue,’ a charmingly naive suggestion that involves sitting down with a man who views his nuclear arsenal as his only insurance policy against a Gadhafi-style retirement plan. Both sides are equally useless, clinging to outdated Cold War playbooks while the North builds a retail-ready arsenal of Doomsday.

Lee Jae Myung’s rhetoric about the weapons going ‘abroad’ is particularly rich. It suggests that there is some moral difference between a nuke sitting in a silo in Pyongyang and one being sold to the highest bidder in a shadowy back-alley transaction. The ‘global danger’ isn’t coming; it’s been here since we decided that the proliferation of technology was an unstoppable tide and that sovereignty was a convenient excuse for lunatics to stockpile plutonium. We are now entering the era of the nuclear yard sale. If North Korea can produce twenty warheads a year, they are no longer just a threat; they are a supplier. In a world where everything is for sale, why should the ultimate weapon be any different? It is the logical conclusion of our species' obsession with the ‘free market’—eventually, the market will provide the tools for its own total erasure.

The cynicism of the situation is compounded by the South’s own desperation. By framing the North’s nuclear program as a ‘global danger,’ Seoul is effectively begging for the rest of the world to care about their neighbor’s kinetic tantrums. It is a plea for attention disguised as a security briefing. The reality is that the world is far too busy collapsing under the weight of its own localized idiocies—inflation, culture wars, and the general decay of civic literacy—to worry about twenty more warheads in a country that has been threatening to turn the world into a ‘sea of fire’ since the mid-nineties. We have reached nuclear fatigue. We are bored of the end of the world.

Ultimately, this isn’t a story about North Korea’s technical prowess or South Korea’s geopolitical anxieties. It is a story about the terminal failure of human governance. We have allowed a hermit kingdom to become a nuclear factory while we argue about the optics of international law. The UN resolutions are scraps of paper; the presidential press conferences are mere theater for the fearful. Whether the weapons stay in the North or travel ‘abroad’ is almost irrelevant. The fact that they exist at all, in such quantities, in such hands, is the only truth that matters. We are just monkeys who found a way to weaponize the sun, and we’re surprised that the most dysfunctional among us are the best at mass-producing it. It’s not a global danger; it’s a global punchline.