"North Korea's nuclear test has dealt it a heavy blow. The NPT is in agony," said Georges Le Guelte, head of research at the Institute of Strategic and International Relations (IRIS) in Paris.

On Wednesday, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana told EU lawmakers that he shared concerns about "the failure, in the last analysis, of the non-proliferation treaty."

He said the text, concluded in 1968 and which entered into force two years later, "has gone through five revisions already and none of the five revisions has been able to face the difficulties and the holes that it has."

"This regime should be adapted to the realities of today and not the realities of yesterday," he said, following North Korea's claim Monday that it had tested a nuclear weapon, sparking worldwide outrage.

Signed by 189 countries -- North Korea pulled out in 2003 -- the treaty is the only multilateral agreement designed to stop atomic weapons from spreading, and it also offers a framework for the development of civilian technology.

The signatories acknowledged that the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain had the bomb but the five powers also made a commitment in it to disarm at some undetermined time in the future.

India, Pakistan and Israel did not sign and are now nuclear powers, although the latter refuses to confirm that it has such weapons.

The NPT appears unable to contain the nuclear ambitions of Pyongyang and those suspected in Tehran, although the Islamic republic denies the allegations, yet some blame the nuclear powers themselves for the problem.

"You can't say that the treaty cannot be applied, only that the major powers who are its guarantors have not done a lot to ensure that it is respected," said Le Guelte.

According to Dominique David, executive director of the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI), the NPT must, above all, be reinforced.

"If it turns out that the test by North Korea really was a nuclear one, it would mean that a country that had committed itself in writing not to build a bomb would have definitively violated the NPT," he said.

He said that Pyongyang's duplicity is self-evident but hard to sanction.

"The problem is that there is no way of sanctioning a country suspected of violating the treaty, when that country pulls out of it at the last minute, just before it acquires a nuclear weapon," he said.

Shannon Kile, senior researcher at the Stockholm-based peace research institute SIPRI, proposed that the treaty be beefed up to deal with such cases.

"In case a country withdraws, it has to give up all its nuclear infrastructures that it has acquired under the NPT," for example, he said.

He pointed out that the document has two main weaknesses.

"The nuclear technology is inherently dual use: the infrastructure for making the fuel for the nuclear plants is the same for nuclear weapons -- that's the central dilemma since the NPT's founding," he said.

"The other weakness is how can you stop a state that is determined to cheat. North Korea was clearly cheating," he went on.

"In the future, the five nuclear powers have to make serious commitments towards disarmament," he warned. "Double standards are not possible anymore."

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