2016 is yet young: We’re hardly into February. But already it’s yielding a grim winter harvest of new dates that will go into future Korean history books, to be remembered and regretted.

Hitherto it was the North, negative as ever, that had made most of the running. On January 6 Pyongyang got the new year off to a bang with its fourth nuclear test, supposedly an H-bomb. A month later on February 7 they made it a double whammy, with a satellite launch – which, as everyone knows, doubles as a partial test of an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM).