Nuclear-powered ambition in North Korea

Kim Jong Il is neither insane nor stupid.

From the CIA's psychological profilers to his many biographers, experts who have studied the North Korean leader think that beneath the eccentricities — the bouffant hair-do and the oddball Mao suits — there is a shrewd operator at work.

Despite an image as a "nut with a nuke," as some bloggers have disparaged him, Kim appears to have orchestrated his country's path to nuclear sovereignty.

If the announced test is confirmed, one of the world's poorest and most dysfunctional countries will have become a gate-crasher in the exclusive club of nuclear powers.

That is an achievement Kim apparently believes will ensure the top item on his agenda: maintaining power.

In Kim's eyes, a nuclear weapon should prevent the United States from attempting to topple him in the manner of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. And the mystique of nuclear capability could, in part, substitute for the charisma Kim, unlike his late father, Kim Il Sung, lacks.

"In the eyes of the North Korean leaders, this was very calculated and rational behavior," said Paik Hak-soon, a political scientist at South Korea's Sejong Institute. "Nobody invades a nuclear power. People respect nuclear power."

Biographers over the years have frequently made the point that Kim Jong Il did not merely inherit power. He seized it. Short, dumpy and lacking in charm, he had to fight his way through other possible successors before taking over in 1994, upon his father's death.

Far less popular domestically than his father, Kim also has had his hands full staying in control, especially given the economic basket case that North Korea became under his watch.

Jerrold Post, founder of the CIA's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior who now teaches at George Washington University, said Kim has had a tougher act to follow than other heirs to power because his father was revered literally as God.

"You have other world leaders whose fathers led before them — King Abdullah of Jordan, Bashir Assad of Syria — but their job pales in comparison to Kim Jong Il ... He had to be the son of God and to sustain the charismatic cult of personality," Post said.

Post, a psychiatrist, does not believe that Kim is psychotic but that he has a dangerous personality disorder that he diagnoses as "malign narcissism." As such, Kim has loyalty only to himself and lacks the ability to consider other people's feelings.

Kim's blatant disregard for his people allowed him to become one of Asia's top gourmets at a time up to 20 percent of North Korea's population died of starvation. To indulge his private whims, he is said to have imported a sushi chef from Japan and a pizza maker from Italy. He sent couriers to Europe to pick up epicurean treats and ordered each grain of his rice inspected.

North Korea's leader apparently saw no hypocrisy in exiling people to the gulag for watching foreign media, while he amassed a collection of 20,000 foreign film titles. From the time that former President Carter visited Pyongyang in 1994 with copies of "Gone with the Wind" and "The Godfather," foreign dignitaries have arrived bearing such gifts.

Kim is known to love cinema. He once ordered the kidnapping of a South Korean actress and her director husband to run North Korea's film studio. He wrote a book, "On the Art of Cinema," about using film to instill socialist values in the masses. His first serious job, at age 30, was with the Department of Propaganda and Agitation for the ruling Workers' Party.

He oversaw a propaganda machine that maintained the elaborate mythology about the ruling family, including the claim that his birth was heralded by the appearance of a bright star and a double rainbow.

But Kim was not so delusional to be fooled by his own propaganda, and he knew he would need more to stay in power. He gradually turned his attention from cinema to weapons of mass destruction.

"Big toys for big boys," is how his psychological profiler, Post, puts it.

The younger Kim steered a nuclear-energy program that had started in the 1960s more in the direction of weapons development. According to numerous accounts by defectors, he ordered nuclear-research and missile-development projects moved from the purview of the military to the Workers' Party Central Committee so he could be more involved.

During the famine of the mid-1990s, ordinary rank-and-file soldiers were allowed to starve to death, while the government poured millions of dollars into the development of weapons of mass destruction. He personally visited the research facilities and lavished scientists with gifts.

"Kim Jong Il didn't care if he bankrupted the rest of the country. He saw the missiles and nuclear weapons as the only way to maintain power," said Kim Dok-hong, former deputy director of the Juche Institute, a Pyongyang think tank devoted to North Korean ideology, in a July interview.

Michael Breen, a Kim biographer, thinks Kim has followed a long-nurtured plan to become a nuclear power and nothing the United States could have done — short of an invasion — would have stopped him.

"From inside the Beltway, people will be talking about the failure of American policy, but I believe the North Koreans did what they always set out to do and became a nuclear state," Breen said.

"They weathered the storm of international condemnation, the potential for a coup or invasion. The way the North Koreans see it, a lesser man might have caved to the pressure, but not Kim Jong Il."

Others said Kim merely wanted respect, particularly from the United States, and would have traded away his nuclear weapons in exchange for recognition of his government.

Post, who has also profiled Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said it is no coincidence that North Korea and Iran accelerated development of nuclear weapons after President Bush lumped them in the "axis of evil" and invaded Iraq. Both had reason to be fearful of a U.S. attack.

"Even if you say that Kim Jong Il is paranoid, it doesn't mean that someone was not out to get him," Post said.