The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as “Fat Man and Little Boy.”) And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. Pueblo strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed; the rest were held for nearly a year before being released. I looked over the spy ship, its radio antennae and surveillance equipment still intact, and found photographs of the captain and crew with their hands on their heads in gestures of abject surrender. Copies of their groveling “confessions,” written in tremulous script, were also on show. So was a humiliating document from the United States government, admitting wrongdoing in the penetration of North Korean waters and petitioning the “D.P.R.K.” (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) for “lenience.” Kim Il Sung (“Fat Man”) was eventually lenient about the men, but not about the ship. Madeleine Albright didn’t ask to see the vessel on her visit last October, during which she described the gruesome, depopulated vistas of Pyongyang as “beautiful.” As I got back onto the wharf, I noticed a refreshment cart, staffed by two women under a frayed umbrella. It didn’t look like much—one of its three wheels was missing and a piece of brick was propping it up—but it was the only such cart I’d see. What toothsome local snacks might the ladies be offering? The choices turned out to be slices of dry bread and cups of warm water.

Nor did Madeleine Albright visit the absurdly misnamed “Demilitarized Zone,” one of the most heavily militarized strips of land on earth. Across the waist of the Korean peninsula lies a wasteland, roughly following the 38th parallel, and packed with a titanic concentration of potential violence. It is four kilometers wide (I have now looked apprehensively at it from both sides) and very near to the capital cities of both North and South. On the day I spent on the northern side, I met a group of aging Chinese veterans, all from Szechuan, touring the old battlefields and reliving a war they helped North Korea nearly win (China sacrificed perhaps a million soldiers in that campaign, including Mao Anying, son of Mao himself). Across the frontier are 37,000 United States soldiers. Their arsenal, which has included undeclared nuclear weapons, is the reason given by Washington for its refusal to sign the land-mines treaty. In August 1976, U.S. officers entered the neutral zone to trim a tree that was obscuring the view of an observation post. A posse of North Koreans came after them, and one, seizing the ax with which the trimming was to be done, hacked two U.S. servicemen to death with it. I visited the ax also; it’s proudly displayed in a glass case on the North Korean side.

A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section “On the Way to the Hotel”: “Let’s Mutilate US Imperialism!” In the section “Word Order”: “Yankees are wolves in human shape—Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.” In the section “Farewell Talk”: “The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.” Not that the book is all like this—the section “At the Hospital” has the term solsaga (“I have loose bowels”), and the section “Our Foreign Friends Say” contains the Korean for “President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.”

I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida (“We have a bumper harvest every year”).

I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn’t hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren’t about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn’t ravenous just for a newspaper that had no pictures of F.M. and L.B. I wasn’t starving just for a TV program or a piece of music or theater or cinema that wasn’t cultist and hero-worshiping. I was hungry. I got off the North Korean plane in Shenyang, one of the provincial capitals of Manchuria, and the airport buffet looked like a cornucopia. I fell on the food, only to find that I couldn’t do it justice, because my stomach had shrunk. And as a foreign tourist in North Korea, under the care of vigilant minders who wanted me to see only the best, I had enjoyed the finest fare available.

North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as “duck.” One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy—they wouldn’t tell me the breed—but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn’t seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there. (In a Pyongyang restaurant, don’t ever ask for a doggie bag.) Nobody knows how many North Koreans have died or are dying in the famine—some estimates by foreign-aid groups run as high as three million in the period from 1995 to 1998 alone—but the rotund, jowly face of Kim Il Sung still beams down contentedly from every wall, and the 58-year-old son looks as chubby as ever, even as his slenderized subjects are mustered to applaud him. Kim Jong Il, incidentally, has been made head of the party and of the army, but the office of the presidency is still “eternally” held by his adored and departed dad, who died on July 8, 1994, at 82. (The Kim is dead. Long live the Kim.) This makes North Korea the only state in the world with a dead president. What would be the right term for this? A necrocracy? A thanatocracy? A mortocracy? A mausolocracy? Anyway, grimly appropriate for a morbid system so many of whose children have died with grass in their mouths.

Even in former days, Korea was known as the “hermit kingdom” for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 “armistice” would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch of China and a short stretch of Siberia; in other words its only contiguous neighbors were Mao and Stalin. (The next-nearest neighbor was Japan, historic enemy of the Koreans and the cruel colonial occupier until 1945.) Add to that the fact that almost every work of man had been reduced to shards by the Korean War. Air-force general Curtis LeMay later boasted that “we burned down every town in North Korea,” and that he grounded his bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang was an ashen moonscape. It was Year Zero. Kim Il Sung could create a laboratory, with controlled conditions, where he alone would be the engineer of the human soul.

During my sojourn in this lab, I got an idea of why the more it remains the same, the more it changes. In the past few years, the hermetic seal has broken and is now leaking in all directions. Take those fearsome cases of anti-American xenophobia with which I began. The uniformed guards who gave me a tour of the U.S.S. Pueblo asked for five dollars to add my visit to the schedule (the ship is normally off-limits) and wanted to score a couple of packs of American cigarettes when the tour was done. The same pourboire worked wonders during my visit to the DMZ. In the basement of my hotel, a casino had been opened by Chinese riffraff from the gambling capital of Macao, who once tried to stop me from playing blackjack because I was wearing peasant sandals and was thus improperly attired. In a karaoke bar in downtown Pyongyang, while I regaled the customers with a spirited rendition of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” “La Bamba,” and, as the night wore on, “Proud Mary,” my Korean friends preferred the soothing banality and individualism of “Yesterday” and—a solid favorite—“My Way.” (There’s a special plangency to the line about facing the final curtain.) One night I snuck off for a sauna and massage. For nearly an hour I was alone and unsupervised with a Korean civilian. But I couldn’t make much of it, because she didn’t speak English and also chose to numb me with techniques that seemed more like Tae Kwon Do than massage. As I took my aching joints back to the hot tub, I saw one of my guides materializing, naked and glistening through the steam. When our eyes met we conceded unspokenly that we’d both gone above and beyond the call of duty.

Playing pool with Korean officials one evening in the Koryo Hotel, which has become the nightspot for foreign businessmen and an increasing number of diplomats (to say nothing of the burgeoning number of spies and journalists traveling under second identities), I was handed that day’s edition of the Pyongyang Times. At first glance it seemed too laughable for words: endless pictures of the “Dear Leader”—Little Boy’s exalted title—as he was garlanded by adoring schoolchildren and heroic tractor drivers. Yet even in these turgid pages there were nuggets: a telegram congratulating the winner of the Serbian elections; a candid reference to the “hardship period” through which the country had been passing; an assurance that a certain nuclear power plant would be closed as part of a deal with Washington. Tiny cracks, to be sure. But a complete and rigid edifice cannot afford fissures, however small. There appear to be no hookers, as yet, in Pyongyang. Yet if casinos come, can working girls be far behind? One perhaps ought not to wish for hookers, but there are circumstances when corruption is the only hope.

The external changes have been much more dramatic, and it’s by means of these hints that those on the inside can at last begin to guess what’s going on in the big world. The Soviet Union has vanished, and its Russian successor no longer wants to buy North Korean goods at the old fraternal rates. China, which once had a lower standard of living than North Korea, is now booming. All along the northern border, even Little Boy’s frontier guards can see that the lights are on all night in China across the Yalu and Tumen Rivers, while blackouts and shortages are the common lot on the North Korean side. (The power cuts out continually in North Korea. The lights went off even while I was touring the U.S.S. Pueblo, which is a showpiece.) The Yanbian prefecture of China’s Jilin Province is largely Korean-speaking, and at least a quarter of a million famine refugees have crossed the border at great risk and are hiding among their kin. This is unprecedented; nobody knows the effect of the “feedback”—a grim term under the circumstances—among the relatives left behind. But, for the first time since the foundation of the North Korean state, a dissident movement is beginning to put out tiny shoots among the hunger exiles, many of whom cross and recross the stricken frontier areas.

Most important of all, though, is the sudden thaw from the South. Kim Dae Jung, this year’s Nobel laureate for peace, is a man much more deserving of adulation than either Fat Man or Little Boy. I’m proud to say that I know him slightly. When he returned to South Korea from exile in 1985, having survived imprisonment and kidnapping and at least one assassination attempt, carried out by the dreaded Korean Central Intelligence Agency, I went along with him and was a witness to his arrest by the military junta at Seoul airport. By dint of truly astonishing bravery and patience—he had to “win” an election that was overturned by the generals before he was allowed finally to succeed—Kim Dae Jung has put an end to half a century of dismal and sordid military/police dictatorship on the southern half of the peninsula. It’s no longer possible for the North Koreans to claim that the “other” regime is a colonial puppet held in place by American troops.

Kim Dae Jung has wagered everything on what he calls a “sunshine” approach to his austere and backward northern neighbor. Everybody’s breath was caught by his visit to Pyongyang last June, and by the reunions of sundered families that followed it. There is even talk of building a direct road and rail link between the South Korean capital of Seoul and Pyongyang—something that would have been unimaginable a year ago.

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men’s room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it’s almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn’t like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.

There’s a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there’s no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn’t be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It’s 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn’t moved in years; it’s a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. “Under construction,” say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.

I saw exactly one picture of Marx and one of Lenin in my whole stay, but it’s been a long time since ideology had anything to do with it. Not without cunning, Fat Man and Little Boy gradually mutated the whole state belief system into a debased form of Confucianism, in which traditional ancestor worship and respect for order become blended with extreme nationalism and xenophobia. Near the southernmost city of Kaesong, captured by the North in 1951, I was taken to see the beautifully preserved tombs of King and Queen Kongmin. Their significance in F.M.-L.B. cosmology is that they reigned over a then unified Korea in the 14th century, and that they were Confucian and dynastic and left many lavish memorials to themselves. The tombs are built on one hillside, and legend has it that the king sent one of his courtiers to pick the site. Second-guessing his underling, he then climbed the opposite hill. He gave instructions that if the chosen site did not please him he would wave his white handkerchief. On this signal, the courtier was to be slain. The king actually found that the site was ideal. But it was a warm day and he forgetfully mopped his brow with the white handkerchief. On coming downhill he was confronted with the courtier’s fresh cadaver and exclaimed, “Oh dear.” And ever since, my escorts told me, the opposite peak has been known as “Oh Dear Hill.”

I thought this was a perfect illustration of the caprice and cruelty of absolute leadership, and began to phrase a little pun about Kim Jong Il being the “Oh Dear Leader,” but it died on my lips. And there is more than just callousness and fatalism to the Confucian style. It was noticeable, during the visit of Kim Dae Jung, that Little Boy observed Confucian etiquette, deferring to his senior at all points and even respectfully adjusting his pace to that of the older man. Similarly, rather than seem too ambitious in taking the succession after his father’s death, he delayed his assumption of formal power and decreed a three-year mourning period for the departed—the pious Confucian maximum. Even the two national flowers—the Kimilsungia and the Kimjongilia—reflect this relative modesty. The Kimilsungia is a gorgeous orchid. The Kimjongilia is a fairly humble member of the begonia family.

Still, the fervor and single-mindedness of this deification probably have no precedent in history. It’s not like Duvalier or Assad passing the torch to the son and heir. It surpasses anything I have read about the Roman or Babylonian or even Pharaonic excesses. An estimated $2.68 billion was spent on ceremonies and monuments in the aftermath of Kim Il Sung’s death. The concept is not that his son is his successor, but that his son is his reincarnation. North Korea has an equivalent of Mount Fuji—a mountain sacred to all Koreans. It’s called Mount Paekdu, a beautiful peak with a deep blue lake, on the Chinese border. Here, according to the new mythology, Kim Jong Il was born on February 16, 1942. His birth was attended by a double rainbow and by songs of praise (in human voice) uttered by the local birds. In fact, in February 1942 his father and mother were hiding under Stalin’s protection in the dank Russian city of Khabarovsk, but as with all miraculous births it’s considered best not to allow the facts to get in the way of a good story.

It was once said of Prussia that it wasn’t a country that had an army, but an army that had a country. And North Korea is a garrison state, a society organized for war. I took a trip on the Pyongyang subway (between the “Resurrection” stop and the “Glory” stop, both of them ornately decorated à la Moscou) and noticed that the escalator took me down to an almost thermonuclear depth; it’s a bomb shelter. In the countryside are long and oddly straight roads with almost no vehicles on them; these must be emergency landing strips and airfields. You see military uniforms on about every 10th person. Partly this is a means of additional regimentation for the society, and partly it’s a solution to the unemployment problem. (The Korean People’s Army doesn’t look so frightening when you see it stripped to the waist and digging ditches with worn-out tools, as I did on the road to Nampo, the country’s main port.) But a gigantic part of the budget still goes for heavy weapons, missile technology, and nuclear power plants.

Like some Lilliput masquerading as Brobdingnag, North Korea likes to bluff the rest of the world and force it to ask, Would this regime be prepared to immolate itself and others to make a last, dying point? The baroque secrecy of the culture and the arcana of its rituals help to give the impression that it might be capable of anything. I witnessed the same “Mass Games” in the colossal May Day Stadium that were, a week or so later, put on to impress Madeleine Albright. Here is how the impression is created.

First, you have to picture the outcome of a 10-year collaboration between Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl. The entire floor of the amphitheater is suddenly filled with hypnotizing phalanxes of men, women, and children (proof on their own of a totally drilled society). With bewilderingly faultless choreography, and to the strains of kitsch light-opera music, people form and re-form into the shapes of Mount Paekdu—complete with blue lake—a raging sea, and a map of the Korean peninsula. On the other side of the arena, a wall of humanity executes the most expert and versatile flash-card displays, turning on a dime from a refulgent and embossed portrait of the Fat Man to a scene of flowers or factories. Every now and then, the sentimental and the folkloric are punctuated, to the accompaniment of massed searchlights and skull-splitting chords, by the image of a granite-jawed soldier with flamethrower and bayonet, or—and this was the climax—by that of a great rocket lofting into the sky. It was at this point that Little Boy turned to Albright with a smile and said, Don’t worry. We won’t test any more of them.

Was this a threat or a promise? Perhaps it was a bit of both. By behaving sullenly, North Korea has gotten attention and aid and even respect. But it remains Lilliput. Don’t lose a sense of proportion: it could not conquer the South, which has more than twice its population, and it certainly could not govern the South even if it could conquer it. North Korea would actually be shattered into fragments and paved over once again if it even tried a war with the United States and its regional allies. And it would not have a friend in the world, which it did last time with the slightly reluctant support of Stalin and Mao. The whole “threat inflation” directed at this distraught Oz-like regime is either slightly paranoid or slightly cynical. The idea of America building a huge, hypothetical, costly “missile shield” to ward off Little Boy is an especial absurdity. His projectiles are antique and inaccurate, and he wouldn’t live to see the first one splash down if he ever did decide to go mad.

But is he mad, as we used to be told he was? From a society and state where the human personality has been ruthlessly erased, and one individual character obscenely exalted, there arises a recurrent question. Are we dealing with a giggling and sadistic playboy, or with a slight oddball who has a bizarre and thwarted need to become a Hollywood auteur, and perhaps possesses latent Gorbachevian tendencies?

Again it could be both. South Korean intelligence blames Little Boy for the bombing of an airliner and for an explosion which killed several members of the South Korean Cabinet. These outrages occurred back in the 1980s, during the rule of Fat Man, so it doesn’t seem likely that Little Boy could have been allowed to commit them on his own. What he did do, on his own initiative, was kidnap a South Korean movie star and have her brought to Pyongyang for his cinematic appreciation. The only people who can be said to “know” Kim Jong Il are Choi Un Hoi, whose screen performances so ravished and captivated him, and her husband, the director Shin Sang Ok. In 1978 they were snatched by Little Boy’s agents in Hong Kong. The concept in the mind of the Dear Director was not a fate worse than death for the wife, but a collaboration on celluloid. Shin spent five years in a North Korean jail for refusing to make any propaganda movies; when released he was told he could have creative and artistic control. The couple spent some quality face time with their host, made him some films, and in 1983 managed to tape-record some of his table talk. So we know that he likes splatter movies (Friday the 13th is an all-time favorite), but also that he admires Liz Taylor and especially her work in Butterfield 8. He maintains lavish postproduction and dubbing facilities and is especially proud when he can get his name on a film credit, which he usually can.

He was also quite outspoken on matters political. The tape, which seems genuine, has him saying that, “after having experienced about 30 years of socialism, I feel we need to expand to the Western world to feed our people.” He adds that the current system gives people no incentive to work, and that South Koreans have reached college level while North Koreans are still in kindergarten. However, he is aware that reforms would threaten the basis of his father’s state. “When China opened up a bit, the first thing the people learned was not technology. Instead, the young people grew their hair long and grew mustaches. They were interested in superficial things. This stems from the emptiness of themselves, and the socialist system. We are in the same situation as China.”

Choi and Shin’s old kidnapper has since published a book—Kim Jong Il on the Art of the Cinema—a copy of which I was able to find (not without a searching glance from my minder) in a Pyongyang bookstore.

There’s much turgid propaganda and boilerplate, but one or two heartfelt observations as well. Robert Altman could surely endorse the following:

A film which merely aims to make a profit by showing off the stars’ faces, cannot be real art.… There cannot be a genuine creative spirit, and the beautiful flower of art cannot bloom where actors sell their faces, and even their souls.

In another of his recent works, Abuses of Socialism Are Intolerable, Little Boy surprised me by confronting head-on the notion that Korean socialism was “totalitarian,” “barracks-like,” and “administrative and commanding.” These words appear, with emphasis, on almost every page. Of course, the muscular prose of the master polemicist makes short work of the accusations. But most North Koreans are never permitted to know what the outside world thinks of their system. They are told instead that the rest of humanity pulses with love for Fat Man and Little Boy. Could there be a coded message here?

If so, it may not be the only one. The most hysterical and ridiculous and grandiose attempt to persuade the North Koreans that the whole world is with them is to be found in the “International Friendship Exhibition,” a colossal marble pagoda among the beauties of Mount Myohyang, about two hours’ drive north from the capital. Built at remorseless expense (and much of it underground, like a lot of North Korean institutions), it houses more than 61,000 gifts, bestowed on the Great Leader and the Dear Leader by foreign heads of state, delegations, and random celebrities. Every schoolchild is brought here at least once, to be assured that Kim Il Sung was an international statesman without peer.

On one level, it is a giant museum to the death of Communism and dictatorship. There are two huge railway carriages—one from Stalin and one from Mao—which commemorate the days when state socialism was something made of wrought iron. Vanished politicians and even vanished regimes are featured: here is a stuffed bear’s head from Nicolae Ceausescu and a bust from East Germany. Capitalist despots are well represented, too, including Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and General Suharto of Indonesia (who also presented a pair of chimps to the national zoo, where they joined a warthog from Robert Mugabe). Every now and then, amid the bric-a-brac of onyx ashtrays or mounted hunting rifles, one finds a gem. A silver box, with the CNN logo, from Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. An English version of Kim Il Sung’s essays, with a foreword by Eldridge Cleaver, from Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times. A white crane sculpture, listed as given by “The Religious Leader of the United States.” Who he? My inquiry is met with polite astonishment. Why, Billy Graham of course. He and his sons are here all the time.

The four entrance doors are made from solid copper and weigh four tons apiece. Shift 16 tons and whaddaya get? A stuffed crocodile, beamingly upright and proffering a cocktail tray, from the Sandinistas. I began to get the giggles, imagining that Kim Il Sung had thousands and thousands of dotty aunts and batty uncles, and had solemnly resolved to keep every one of their rubbishy birthday and Christmas presents in case they ever came to call.

However, in the smaller adjacent building, devoted to the gifts received by Little Boy, we find a whole new note being struck. Almost every present and tribute is from a foreign business. Plaques from British insurance companies are prominent, for some reason. Most astonishing, though, is the main room, which is given over to the trophies of the recent summit with Kim Dae Jung. Vast, shiny wide-screen TV sets and computer monitors, bearing the logos of Samsung and Daewoo. A limousine—interestingly called a Dynasty limousine—from Chung Ju Yung, the founder of Hyundai. Mr. Chung also gets his picture displayed, with a smiling Little Boy. The whole room is a shrine to consumer capitalism. What must the North Korean visitors think as they are paraded around the exhibits and shown goods they have never seen? Their faces give nothing away. But if this is not a hint about a possible future, perhaps along the lines of the “two Chinas,” I don’t know what would be.

Suppose we picture North Korea as a gigantic film set, with everyone a conscripted extra. The sole director feels he needs more scope. But he doesn’t quite want to share power with the larger studio system, and thus sacrifice his autonomy. I went to the official film studios, which are nowhere near as luxurious as Little Boy’s private facilities. They consist of a series of huge back lots populated by listless and bored people. On the whole expanse of one million square meters, nothing was being shot. The entire place wore an air of complete torpor. One abandoned set represented a street in Seoul, the South Korean capital, in the early 1960s. The street, intended obviously to suggest decadence, featured some bars and a brothel and a cinema advertising Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch. After spending some time in Pyongyang, I thought, Boy, I could use a little of that.

But then, quitting the back lots for downtown Pyongyang, I suddenly realized that the whole place is for show. It’s an “as if” society. Uniformed female traffic cops do pirouettes at intersections, though there are no cars. Newspapers come out, though they contain no news. Restaurants produce menus of nonexistent dishes. At the airport, there are barely any planes. In the national art gallery—they understand that you have to have a national art gallery—almost all the paintings are of the same two people. In the Palace of Children—a forbidding structure with no play space—I found a class of tiny Koreans solemnly learning Morse code under the supervision of an adult. He unblinkingly beep-beeped and they doggedly transcribed the dots and dashes. Nobody has told them that the international community abandoned Morse two years ago.

Worst of all was the Great People’s Study Hall, a huge book depository erected on one side of Kim Il Sung Square. It cost, I was proudly told, $100 million. There are desks, card catalogues, shelves; it’s free and open to the “public”—it’s just what it would be like if Pyongyang had a public library. But almost all the books seemed to be by or about Fat Man and Little Boy, and though I was informed that there was an edition of Les Misérables in Korean, it couldn’t be produced. (Why did they volunteer that one?) On every floor there is a room where, I was told, a professor sits and makes himself available for questions. I was even pointed to a door behind which such a professor sat. What a great idea! Since journalists are not allowed, I was visiting Pyongyang in my other guise, that of university lecturer. I asked if I could put a question to the professor. Instant panic. “There’s no time—you’ll miss the rest of the tour.” No, that’s O.K., I’m not in a hurry. “But he’s a social-science professor.” Fine—I’ve got just the question for him. “But he specializes in political economy.” Good. After a lot of fluttering and (on my part) a certain smiling obstinacy, my guide knocked and opened the door. A small man looked up from behind a large desk. The desk was bare. He seemed petrified, as if caught masturbating or harboring impure thoughts about the Dear Leader. There was a long anxious exchange in Korean, after which I was told that, unfortunately, the professor answered only questions about Kim Il Sung as a geographer. I have to admit that I could not think of any, and I also realized that the man’s discomfort was acute. “Such pity,” said my guide soothingly. She meant “Such a pity,” but I agreed nonetheless.

It would be nice to think that the menacing aspects of North Korea were for display also, that the bombs and reactors were Potemkin showcases or bargaining chips. On the plane from Beijing I met a group of unsmiling Texan types wearing baseball caps. They were the “in-country” team from the International Atomic Energy Agency, there to inspect and neutralize North Korea’s plutonium rods. Not a nice job, but, as they say, someone has to do it. Speaking of the most controversial reactor at Yongbyon, one of the guys said, “No sweat. She’s shut down now.” Nice to know. But then, so is the rest of North Korean society shut down—animation suspended, all dead quiet on the set, endlessly awaiting not action (we hope) or even cameras, but light.