So, the United Nations has imposed further sanctions on North Korea following that country’s continued nuclear missile tests. All well and good, so you would think, but will those sanctions have any effect?

Clearly, the United Nations has to do everything it can to prevent international conflict (that’s why it was set up in the first place) and there is no doubt that a renegade state such as North Korea presents a potentially significant threat to world peace. The utterances from Pyongyang, the nation’s capital, have hardly been conciliatory and the new leader seems to be no better balanced than his late father.

The world has always had problems with megalomaniacs, from Genghis Khan to Adolf Hitler, and inevitably the threat has always been neutralised but only after a catastrophic loss of human life. North Korea’s baby-faced leader may well have no dreams of world domination but the danger of his owning a nuclear weapon is the equivalent of allowing a small child to play with a live hand grenade.

At least North Korea’s long standing ally, China, supports the new sanctions so perhaps there is some hope for the world. Let us hope so and, more to the point, let us hope that the small child fails to pull out the pin to the grenade.