A riddle wrapped in an enigma: North Korea is an isolated, poor, and cultish society. Its recent attempts to reform have been stymied--not least by its admission that it has a nuclear-weapons program.

• Author: French, Howard W.
• Position: Illustration

PYONGYANG, North Korea--When our plane landed here in North Korea's capital, there were no other jets in sight. A huge portrait of the nation's founder, Kim Il Sung, stared out from atop the airport's musty terminal. A tour bus with government-appointed guides met us at the foot of the plane. The ride down a broad, empty road toward the city's center was eerily quiet.

We passed monument after monument to Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il, the short, pudgy leader with a bouffant hairdo who took the reins of power after his father's death in 1994. The father-and-son dynasty has ruled this nation disastrously for more than half a century, imposing on it a hardline brand of Communism.

As we drove, I asked my official guide, Sim Mo, how far the airport was to downtown. "It takes about 30 minutes," she said. Then she added, "Oh, that could confuse a foreigner, because in other countries they have traffic."

Welcome to North Korea, one of the world's most troubling dictatorships. This country of 22 million people relies heavily on international food aid to feed its starving people. Yet it spends heavily to maintain an army of about 1 million people and a weapons program that has led to the country's inclusion in President George W. Bush's "axis of evil." Kim Il Sung, enshrined in statues and images everywhere, is regarded as a deity (he is known as "Great Leader"; his son took on the title "Dear Leader"). And for decades, North Korea has been one of the world's most isolated societies.

"It's kind of like a medieval kingdom, with Kim Jong Il deciding just about everything," says Ralph Hassig, co-author of North Korea Through the Looking Glass. "If I had to sum up the whole country in one word, I think `stifling' would be it."

ATTEMPTS TO OPEN UP AND REFORM

A summit meeting here in September between the reclusive Kim and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was intended to mark North Korea's opening up to the outside world. Though neighbors, Japan and North Korea have never had diplomatic relations; indeed, North Korea had few ties with any economically advanced democracies until recently.

Soon after the meeting with Koizumi, North Korea made a spectacular announcement: It planned to open a large, capitalist-style industrial zone in the north of the country, on the border with China. The announcement seemed to indicate further dramatic economic reforms, similar to the liberalization policies that China adopted, starting in the late 1970s, to transform that country from a stagnant, Communist backwater to one of the world's most dynamic economies.

But the months since then have seen nothing but setbacks to North Korea's plans. Confronted by American officials in early October, it acknowledged that it has a nuclear-weapons program (and even hinted that it could have other weapons of mass destruction). This revelation--a clear violation of nuclear arms-control agreements negotiated with the United States in 1994--sharply increased tensions between North Korea, its neighbors (particularly Japan and South Korea), and the United States, which maintains about 37,000 troops in South Korea.

In response, the U.S. asked South Korea and Japan to impose economic sanctions on North Korea to encourage it to abandon its nuclear ambitions and open its facilities to international inspection. Both countries agreed to suspend oil shipments to North Korea.

That has been hard on a country already in desperate economic shape. North Korea's economy began a catastrophic decline in the late 1980s, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the other Communist countries in Eastern Europe that were its major trading partners. For...