Defense Secretary William Cohen toured Japan and South Korea last week, reaffirming alliances with Tokyo and Seoul, reiterating U.S. resolve that North Korea will not become a nuclear power.

The extent to which Cohen’s trip pays off may be seen this week, as diplomats from the U.S., the two Koreas and China meet once again in Geneva to craft a treaty to end the Korean War.

One of the most forgotten things about what Americans call the Forgotten War is that it never ended. There was an armistice in 1953, but never a peace treaty.

That North and South Korea have been at war for a half-century, while rarely firing anything more than the occasional warning shot, would be little more than a historical oddity were the stakes suddenly not so high. There is mounting, irrefutable evidence that North Korea is aggressively pursuing the development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The unarmed medium-range missile it fired over Japan last summer shows it also has the vehicle to deliver them.

This will be the fourth round of peace talks in Geneva in the last year and it may, one way or the other, be the last. In mid-August, just two weeks before North Korea demonstrated its missile prowess, U.S. spy satellites detected a huge underground site near the capital city of Pyongyang that analysts say can only be a nuclear-weapons testing facility.

If so, it would be a clear violation of deal made five years ago, when the U.S., Japan and South Korea agreed to build two non-weapons-grade nuclear reactors in North Korea provided the North abandoned its nuclear weapons program. Pyongyang still wants the reactors and is demanding $300 million from the allies in exchange for the right to inspect the site.

“That’s a pretty expensive peek,” said Cohen while touring a U.S. air base in northern Japan. Much too expensive, and not just in dollars.

North Korea is the most peculiar and perhaps most dangerous nation in the world today. Its leaders are obsessed with military power, secrecy and the elimination of dissent. It is just the type of country Stalin had in mind; Pyongyang is Baghdad without CNN keeping an eye on things from a downtown hotel.

Unlike Iraq, Congress pays little attention to North Korea. Only a few senators, such as John McCain of Arizona and Frank Murkowski of Alaska, have spoken out against the $300-million blackmail demand and acknowledge that powerful economic interests would be sorely disappointed should the construction of two nuclear reactors be shelved.

China naturally sides with North Korea in asserting that the successful negotiation of a peace treaty will require disconnecting the financing of a pair of civilian reactors from an inspection of an underground military facility. Secretary Cohen disagrees. When the diplomats return from Geneva, Congress will have to decide whether a peaceful end to a forgotten war is worth setting the stage for a real one.