Welcome to North Korea

This film, shot mostly covertly, shows the irony of a regime where 20 million people lived in poverty, some on the brink of starvation, while former dictator Kim II Sung built extravagant monuments to reflect his power. He fostered a grotesque personality cult, which his son and successor Kim Jong Il perpetuates. All around the capital, Pyongyang, an endless stream of propaganda glorifies the leaders. Monuments and museums pay homage to them, but they are strangely empty. The contrast between capitalist South Korea and the impoverished North is dramatically shown. The founder of Hyundai, Tsjoen Joe Jung is held in great esteem in the south. He believes in uniting the two Koreas and has made significant donations to economic development in the north, trying to ease the way to reunion. The film crew was not allowed to interview people at random. The ones "selected to speak to foreigners" gave an idealized image of the regime that was hardly credible. Footage shot secretly by a Chinese relief organization attests to a generation dying from starvation and disease, and suffering terrible human rights abuses. Welcome to North Korea captures in a vivid manner the tight grip the regime has on its people, with a power not used benevolently.

Profile: Kim Jong-il

The little that is known about Kim Jong-il, North Korea's leader, conjures up a caricature of a diminutive playboy, a comic picture at odds with his brutal regime. Diplomats and escaped dissidents talk of a vain, paranoid, cognac-guzzling hypochondriac. He is said to wear platform shoes and favour a bouffant hairstyle in order to appear taller than his 5 feet 3 inches. But analysts are undecided whether his eccentricities mask the cunning mind of a master manipulator or betray an irrational madman. Mr Kim may well encourage the myth-making surrounding him precisely in order to keep the Western world guessing. North Korea has little to bargain with, and ignorance breeds fear. The analysis of him as a mercurial fantasist is certainly beguiling. He is said to have a library of 20,000 Hollywood movies and to have even written a book on the cinema. He even went so far as to engineer the kidnapping, in 1978, of a South Korean film director and his girlfriend. This taste for the exotic apparently extends to gastronomy. Konstantin Pulikovsky, a Russian emissary who travelled with Mr Kim by train across Russia in reported that the North Korean leader had live lobsters air-lifted to the train every day which he ate with silver chopsticks. The two men shared champagne with a bevy of female companions of "utmost beauty and intelligence", according to Mr Pulikovsky. Mr Kim also has a reputation as a drinker. He was seen draining 10 glasses of wine during his 2000 summit with the South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and is known to have a taste for Hennessy VSOP cognac.

But such an unlikely reputation masks Mr Kim's dangerous past. As head of North Korea's special forces for much of the 70s and 80s, he has been linked by defectors to international terrorist activities, including the 1986 bombing of a Korean Airlines jet in which 115 people died. Nor should it be assumed that eccentricity means inability. Mr Kim is said to assiduously follow international events on the internet, and some see him as a clever manipulator, willing to take great risks to underpin his regime - such as his apparent decision to test a nuclear device. Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who has met Mr Kim, said that the North Korean leader was very well informed and "was not delusional". "I found him very much on top of his brief," she said, although she noted that some of the comments he made about his plans for the North Korean economy sounded illogical.

The cult surrounding Kim Jong-il extends even to his birth. He was born in Siberia in 1941 when his father, Kim Il-sung, was in exile in the former Soviet Union. But according to official North Korean accounts, he was born in a log cabin at his father's guerrilla base on North Korea's highest mountain, Mt Paektu, in February 1942. The event was reportedly marked by a double rainbow, and a bright star in the sky. The younger Kim graduated from Kim Il-sung University in 1964, and after a period of grooming for leadership, he was officially designated successor to his father in 1980. But he did not hold any positions of real power until 1991, when he took control of the armed forces - despite his lack of military experience. Analysts believe he was given the position to counter potential resistance to his eventual succession. After the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994, it was three years before he took over the leadership of the ruling Korean Workers' Party.

North Korea and Nuclear weapons

Six nation talks on North Korea's nuclear programme have resumed in Beijing two months after the North tested a nuclear device. BBC News looks at the long-running crisis. Why does this issue matter so much? North Korea's 9 October nuclear test follows four years of mounting tension between North Korea and the US, in what is possibly the most serious threat to East Asia's short and long-term security. The test cements North Korea's place as a nuclear power, ending hopes of ending the North's ambitions through stalled six-nation talks. It also greatly increases the risk of an East Asian arms race, as countries like Japan and South Korea weigh up whether to go nuclear as well. Why did North Korea decide to test? The secretive North's leader Kim Jong-il appears to have given up negotiating and opted for a show of defiance. He may have decided the US was never going to meet his conditions for giving up the North's nuclear programmes. North Korea's official media has long warned that the US was preparing to attack, and developing a nuclear capability was the only way to prevent this. Mr Kim may also still be smarting after China, the North's only real ally, backed UN sanctions against the country in July. Left isolated, Mr Kim may have felt that a nuclear test was the best way to shore up his own authority at home. What do we know about North Korea's nuclear weapons programme? North Korea claims to be working on building up its nuclear weapons arsenal. The problem for the rest of the world is that it is very difficult to verify these claims. Most arms control experts suspect North Korea did pursue an active weapons programme - certainly up to 1994, when it signed a landmark agreement to freeze all nuclear-related activities.

But in December 2002, it restarted its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon and forced two UN nuclear monitors to leave the country. It is unclear how far work has progressed at Yongbyon since then. If the reactor were fully operational, some analysts believe it could produce enough plutonium to build approximately one weapon per year. America's CIA says a separate, enriched uranium programme could be producing "two or more" bombs each year by the middle of this decade. How many weapons does North Korea already possess? This is very hard to say without full IAEA inspections. Experts believe that North Korea may have extracted sufficient plutonium for a small number of bombs. US officials have put the number at "one or two".

About 8,000 spent fuel rods that were put into storage in 1994 could also be used to extract enough weapons-grade plutonium for a handful more weapons, the US believes. North Korea has said it has already finished reprocessing these fuel rods, although South Korean and US intelligence are unsure whether to believe that claim. Other estimates say the North may now have eight or more bombs. Could North Korea now drop a nuclear bomb? Although the North has tested a nuclear bomb, security analysts do not believe it has managed to make a device small enough to deliver on a missile. This implies that for now at least, its only way of dropping a bomb would be via aircraft, which the US and its allies would be able to monitor. However, the North is also working on long range missiles, one of which is believed to have a potential range of several thousand kilometres. The test will add to pressure on Japan to speed up its missile defences, and also may add to calls for Japan to have a nuclear deterrent too, though the US would firmly oppose this.

Wasn't there an agreement in 2005 that was meant to have resolved the stand-off? Yes, but that agreement is now in tatters. In fact, the optimism only lasted a day because the most difficult parts of the stand-off - such as whether North Korea has an undisclosed uranium programme - were not mentioned in the agreement. There was no mention of what happens to North Korea's existing nuclear facilities, and neither was the issue of future verification made clear. What is the background to the crisis? Relations between the US and North Korea have been deteriorating since President George W Bush labelled North Korea part of an "axis of evil" in January 2002.

Tensions really started escalating the following October, when the US accused North Korea of developing a secret, uranium-based nuclear weapons programme. Washington is not only concerned about the development of such weapons in North Korea, but also wants to curb Pyongyang's capacity to export missile and nuclear technology to other states or organisations. Since the October 2002 confrontation, North Korea has restarted a mothballed nuclear power station, thrown out inspectors from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and pulled out of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. It has also upped its frequently doom-laden rhetoric, warning of the risk of nuclear war. It is often very difficult to tell what lies behind North Korea's moves. Pyongyang and its mercurial leader Kim Jong-il act in erratic and contradictory ways. But it seems possible that North Korea has been trying to use the nuclear issue as a hard-line ploy to negotiate a non-aggression pact and improved economic aid from the US.

A Day in the Life of North Korea

Kim Jong-il, the leader of North Korea, enjoys an absolute power that other dictators can only dream of. His cult of personality stretches from cradle to grave, filling North Koreans with a potent mix of national pride, virulent anti-Americanism and siege mentality. Documentary-maker Pieter Fleury had the rare chance to capture this on film with government permission. North Korea remains isolated and in fear of an Iraq-style invasion from the United States. International crisis talks continue over the regime's nuclear weapons programme. But This World has uncovered evidence of another more chilling evil: that North Korea is testing new chemical weapons on women and children.

The nuclear Great Game

When Pyongyang declared it had an advanced nuclear programme, the shock waves reverberated worldwide. But how was a state teetering on the verge of bankruptcy able to develop such a sophisticated programme? How did North Korea obtain the necessary nuclear components to threaten world peace? This week’s astonishing documentary exposes how it was China who conspired to assist Pakistan and North Korea in becoming nuclear states. Without this crucial aid, neither would have been able to develop nuclear warheads on their own. Why did America turn a blind eye to this covert nuclear trade? As North Korea removed U.N. monitoring equipment from its nuclear facilities, the rhetoric from Pyongyang fueled rising tensions on the Korean peninsula. CNN State Department producer Elise Labott spoke to Anchor Carol Costello about the U.S. position and policy regarding North Korea's nuclear moves.

LABOTT: Well this diplomatic brinkmanship between the United States and North Korea falls somewhere between a game of chess and a game of chicken. The latest move, as you said, yesterday by North Korea removing that equipment from its nuclear facilities. And U.S. officials believe that North Korea is just trying to get the Bush administration to blink, that if they turn up the heat high enough they can push the United States to negotiate some sort of non-aggression pact which says that the United States has no hostile intent toward Pyongyang and offers the regime of President Kim Jong Il some sort of security guarantees.

In fact, yesterday we heard from North Korean officials in the state-run media warning the United States if it doesn't come to the table and negotiate they'd be provoking a nuclear war, which could lead to uncontrollable consequences. And, Carol, as you noted, officials at all levels of the U.S. government are saying that as much as they want a peaceful solution, they'd like to solve this diplomatically. They're not going to be blackmailed. They are not going to reward bad behavior by North Korea and that the only way Pyongyang can gain the support of the United States is to make good on its pledges to stop developing this nuclear weapons program.

COSTELLO: You know the timing of this has always surprised me because the United States supposedly is on the brink of invading Iraq. Why isn't North Korea afraid of that?

LABOTT: Well, actually, officials believe that the North is trying to leverage the fact that the United States is focused on another crisis right now. They'd like some attention, they're trying to up the ante and get the United States to pay attention to them. But officials tell us that although they are, you know, a bit focused on Iraq right now, they have a one-at-a-time mentality regarding the "axis of evil" countries that President Bush laid out, North Korea, Iraq and Iran. And although they're focused on Iraq right now, certainly they'll get around to North Korea; and so they're really not balking at this right now -- Carol.

COSTELLO: So, Elise, are any talks going on today on Christmas Day or are they taking a break?

LABOTT: Well, unfortunately, Secretary of State Colin Powell is spending his holiday doing intense phone diplomacy. Yesterday he spoke to the Japanese foreign minister and over the past several days in touch with his counterparts in Russia, China, South Korea, European countries trying to defuse the crisis. In particular, the United States is pushing Russia and China, who have a great deal of influence in North Korea, to back down, allow some monitoring by the IAEA once again. But, Carol, given the path North Korea seems to be going down, officials acknowledge that the clock is ticking here.