AT TIMES of hunger — when the rice has gone and all the dogs and cats have been eaten — North Korean children scavenge the fields for crows, dragonflies and rats. The countryside is littered with abandoned factories: not only is there no fuel for the machinery, but all the metal from the power cables has been stripped and sold.

Diplomats in the capital, Pyongyang, worry about sending their cooks out to shop for dinner parties because the few hundred pounds they carry with them is the equivalent of several decades’ wages for the average worker.

Economically North Korea is a husk of a country, poor by the standards of sub-Saharan Africa, let alone those of booming East Asia. But yesterday, despite ideological bankruptcy, growing diplomatic isolation and a famine in the 1990s that killed as many as three million people, it became the ninth member of the nuclear club. Whatever else is true about North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il — and there is no doubt that he is a tyrant and a killer on an historic scale — it is impossible to deny his genius in playing the weakest hand of cards with shrewdness and skill.

Mr Kim is often spoken of as a madman and, in many ways, North Korea is a ludicrous place. There is the quaintly ferocious Cold War rhetoric with its denunciations of the “imperialist aggressors”. There is the quasi-religious personality cult of the “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il and his late father, “President” Kim Il Sung, the only head of state technically to remain in power after his death. But the Government knows what it is doing: from its position of isolation and siege, its actions during the past few years have been cool, rational and remarkably effective.

Mr Kim has one goal: the survival of himself and his regime. This he has achieved against all predictions. The country he inherited in 1994 was a product of the Cold War and the division of the Korean Peninsula into the communist North and the US-backed South. Under Russian and Chinese sponsorship the North had survived, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union it began a seemingly unstoppable downward spiral.

Without handouts of oil, food and cash from Moscow, many of its industries lurched to a halt. Floods washed away its fields and precipitated the deadly famine. By the late 1990s it seemed only a matter of time before Mr Kim went the same way as other Stalinist despots.

But he was protected by his most loathsome attribute — his brutal suppression of dissent. As far as one can tell from a country from which little information except propaganda escapes, Mr Kim does not now have to stifle dissent, for there is no evidence that there is any. The cult of the Kims is the only version of reality to which ordinary North Koreans have access. The regime’s cruelty, including the vast network of labour camps containing tens of thousands of prisoners and their extended families, is not crazed sadism but a rational instrument of control.

In the absence of a functioning economy, Mr Kim has turned to crime. According to US government assessments many of the amphetamines sold in Japan and South Korea have been made in North Korean laboratories. Mr Kim is accused of counterfeiting high-quality dollar bills, all the time receiving foreign humanitarian aid.

The nuclear programme can be seen in the same way: not as an end in itself, but as a means of heading off the fate of every other Stalinist dictator. Repeatedly, North Korea has stepped back from its nuclear programme. In 1994 it did so after a deal with the Clinton Administration by which it froze its nuclear reactor in return for fuel oil and the promise of safe reactors incapable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. The US never thought that Mr Kim would survive to see the reactors put in place, and fell behind on its commitments.

Then came President Bush with his “Axis of Evil”, of which North Korea was the third member, and his doctrine of pre-emptive attack. Mr Bush spoke of his personal “loathing” for Kim Jong Il, and the fate of Saddam Hussein offered an example of what would happen to those who had no way of deterring a US attack. North Korea’s conventional forces have been deteriorating for years. What other means did Mr Kim have of protecting himself but nuclear weapons?

The Bush Administration accused the North Koreans of working on a separate uranium enrichment programme, and cut off the promised fuel oil. Mr Kim promptly walked out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and reopened his plutonium reactor. The US, China, Russia, Japan, South and North Korea sat down repeatedly for inconclusive talks. At the fifth and last round, North Korea offered to abandon its nuclear programme in stages in return for security guarantees; the US insisted full disarmament come first — a display of will that many today will regret.

Since then North Korea has escalated the situation faster than ever. In July it test-fired ballistic missiles despite a chorus of warnings not to do so. But the concrete consequences were few, and Mr Kim probably calculates that there is little that the world can do this time either, barring an unthinkably devastating war.

The rest of the world calls him a madman and tells him that he is making things worse for himself with every step. But he is alive, he is still in power, and that in itself is an astonishing success.

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