Kim Jong Un must be enjoying the agitation in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in respect of the atomic bomb. The committee held a hearing yesterday on whether limitations on the president’s authority to use such weapons are needed now that Donald Trump is commander-in-chief. If legislation emerges next year, they could call it the Kim Jong Un Emboldenment Act of 2018.

The Dear Leader shouldn’t get too excited. The hearing appears to be the brainstorm of Chairman Corker. He is the junior senator of Tennessee. Only someone of his ilk could look at the North Korean atomic bomb program and reckon that the destabilizing element is Mr. Trump. The Tennessean is the first figure in the Republican leadership to crack in the face of North Korean saber rattling.

Senator Corker’s case of the nerves became apparent in his notorious phone call to the New York Times. That’s when he told reporter Jonathan Martin that he worries about the president’s “volatility.” The second time the senator used that word, Mr. Martin asked whether the Tennessean thought the country was “in jeopardy.” The senator expressed confidence in Secretaries Tillerson and Mattis.

Then, after a bit, he said that sometimes he feels like Mr. Trump is “on a reality show of some kind, you know, when he’s talking about these big foreign policy issues. And, you know, he doesn’t realize that, you know, that we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making.” He went on to say that he doesn’t believe that Mr. Trump is “a warmonger in any way.”

Put the Sun in the camp that is more alarmed by Mr. Corker than the president. The senator made no mention of the fact that North Korean atomic bomb program surfaced during the presidency of Wm. Clinton and was ratcheted up during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years. Or that each one of them kicked the North Korean atomic bomb program down the road.

What’s really shocking is that each one of the previous presidents handed his successor a problem that, in Korea, was more serious than the one he inherited. So which of them has behaved more responsibly than the current president? If we take anything from what Mr. Trump has been saying it is that rather than hand the Korean problem of to his successor he intends to address it.

Famous last words, but we, for one, wish the President luck. Any chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee ought to be doing everything in his power to be strengthening the President’s hand. How will that be accomplished by legislation requiring that any use of the weapons be authorized by a committee of the president’s underlings, which seems to be an idea the New York Times is retailing?

Its editorial this morning gets behind legislation that would prohibit the President from being the first to strike with a nucular weapon absent a war declaration by Congress. Hard to see that squaring with separated powers. Ditto another Times idea: to “stipulate that the vice president or the secretaries of state and defense, or all three, must concur in any decision to strike first with nuclear weapons.”

What condescending claptrap. History has proven, moreover, that the big error in Korea is not over-threatening but under-threatening — witness Dean Acheson’s notorious speech in January 1950 to the National Press Club in Washington. That’s when he failed to list Korea as being one of America’s vital interests. Six months later, the Red Chinese attacked. So much for the wisdom of secretaries of state.