Profile Kim Jong-il: His people are told that a swallow forecast Kim Jong-il's birth, after which a new star appeared in the heavens. But this week, North Korea's eccentric dictator made a gesture no one could doubt, writes Deaglán de Bréadún.
In one of his best-known movies, White Heat, James Cagney plays a gangster whose domineering mother constantly spurs him to become "top of the world".
At the end, Cagney finds himself at bay with the police closing in. Standing atop a huge gas-tank as it is about to explode, his last words are: "Made it, Ma - top of the world!" It's a scene that irresistibly comes to mind when considering the career of Kim Jong-il, "dear leader" of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). After last Monday, it appears that North Korea's head of state can also blow up the world - and himself along with it.
Whether this incendiary ambition can be traced back to his mother, Kim Jong-suk, is uncertain. Little is known about her except that she died in 1949, leaving him in the care of his father, Kim Il-sung, founder and original leader of one of the world's most bizarre societies.
Although Kim Il-sung died in 1994, aged 82, he still remains president of the DPRK, the only deceased individual to hold a position as head of state. This decision was ostensibly taken as a mark of respect to his memory but it has the useful spin-off that, since his son Kim Jong-il is not the president, he doesn't have to bother calling elections.
The message from people who have been to North Korea is: forget everything you know if you want to understand this place. One of the last of the old Stalinist states, the DPRK has a murky reputation as a closed society where freedom is non-existent, corruption and repression rampant and the people are living on the edge of starvation.
Reliable information about the DPRK and its leader is difficult to obtain, and distinguishing fact from fiction is no easy task. We are told, for example, that Kim Jong-il wears heel supports and platform shoes because he is is only 160cm, or 5ft 3in, in height. Like his father, he reportedly suffers from a deep-rooted fear of flying and, Trotsky-like, travels in an armoured train on official visits to Russia and China. The media also carried a report that, during a trip across Russia, he had lobsters air-lifted to the train every day, which he ate with silver chopsticks. He is said to have a fondness for Hennessy brandy, Mercedes-Benz cars and fashionable Bianchi bicycles.
It is fairly definite that Kim loves basketball and, at the end of a visit six years ago, then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright presented him with a ball signed by the legendary Michael Jordan.
Less reliably, Kim is described as a major-league film buff, with 20,000 titles in his private collection. Whether these include White Heat is not revealed, but his favourites are the Rambo and James Bond films and, in the horror-movie line, Friday the 13th. Further, he took part in the production of a film earlier this year called Diary of a Girl Student, promoting the ideology of Juche (self-reliance), North Korea's state doctrine. According to the official Korean Central News Agency, Kim "improved its script and guided its production to become a masterpiece of the times", and the film was "screened before full houses in Pyongyang every day".
Even the date of his birth is disputed. His official biography states that he was born at Mount Paektu in northern Korea on February 16th, 1942.
Soviet records show he was born in the Siberian village of Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk, on February 16th, 1941, where his father commanded a battalion of Chinese and Korean exiles.
It is said that his date of birth was "finessed" so that he would be seen to be 50 as his father was reaching his 80th year.
It gets better. The official version has it that Kim Jong-il's birth in a log cabin at Mount Paektu was foretold by a swallow and heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain as well as a new star in the heavens.
Whatever about swallows, Kim has certainly put the cat among the pigeons with his alleged underground nuclear test at the start of this week.
Scientific opinion is uncertain as to whether it was a real nuclear explosion, but clearly the intention was there and, given the availability of expertise and materials these days, it has long been on the cards that he would acquire the Bomb.
WHY DID HE do it? As with most acts of desperation, the best answer is fear. Heading a troubled and anachronistic regime, Kim and his associates face a dubious and uncertain future. A Japanese official who knows the North Koreans well says they were shocked when President Bush included their state as part of the "Axis of Evil" with Iran and Iraq. Since then, Iraq has been invaded and plunged into chaos. Iran is also in the eye of the storm. The DPRK leadership does not need much persuading that they could be next. Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
In that situation, threatened states and regimes tend to reach for the strongest weapon they can find. In North Korea's case it seems to be the ultimate weapon, the world's nightmare and the destroyer of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Madeleine Albright put it in an interview with the Financial Times: "The message out of Iraq is that if you don't have nuclear weapons you get invaded; if you do have nuclear weapons, you don't get invaded." Pyongyang's mindset has been framed by the experience of the Korean War (1950-53), during which the US threatened on several occasions to launch nuclear attacks. As a boy, Kim was sent to China for safety while the conflict was raging. Back home, he studied economics at the eponymous Kim Il-sung University, graduating in 1964, naturally with the highest honours. He is also said to have studied English at the University of Malta in the early 1970s as a guest of then-prime minister Dom Mintoff.
Meanwhile, his father had married again and there was another son, Kim Pyong-il. There is no firm evidence that the latter was ever considered as a successor but it is certainly convenient that he has served abroad in a variety of North Korean embassies since 1988. Currently Kim Pyong-il is Ambassador to Poland.
Kim Jong-il joined the politburo of the ruling Korean Workers' Party in 1969 and, in 1973, became the party's secretary of organisation and propaganda. The following year he was officially designated as his father's successor, although the elder Kim lived on and retained power for another 20 years.
His father had come to be known as the "Great Leader" and a similar cult of personality began to develop around the son, who acquired the title "Dear Leader". The official media promoted him as the "peerless leader" and "the great successor to the revolutionary cause". In 1992, Kim Il-sung announced that his son was in charge of all internal affairs in the DPRK. The same year, Kim Jong-il's voice was broadcast for the first and only time. During a military parade, he took the microphone and declared: "Glory to the heroic soldiers of the People's Army!"
Kim Jong-il demands total obedience and views any deviation as an indication of disloyalty. There is much speculation about his possible successor and the South Korean media have suggested he is preparing his son, Kim Jong-chul, for the job.
His eldest boy, Kim Jong-nam, was earlier believed to be the Chosen One, but he appears to have fallen out of favour after a man bearing his name was arrested in New Tokyo International Airport (now Narita International Airport) in Narita, Japan, near Tokyo, in 2001 while travelling on a forged Dominican passport, when he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland.
Comedians in the US lampoon the North Korean leader as "Kim Jong Mentally Ill" or claim that he has a brother called "Menta Lee-il" and far-right broadcaster Rush Limbaugh calls him a "pot-bellied dictator". But nobody's laughing at the moment. Kim Jong-il may be in possession of the Bomb and, if we're not careful, he might end up using it. Just for now, Kim is top of the world.
Deaglán de Bréadún is the Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times.
The Kim Jong-il File
Who is he? Supreme ruler and demi-god of the hermit-state of North Korea
Why is he in the news? Armed and dangerous - possibly with nuclear weapons
Most appealing characteristic: Lives very far away, but not far enough
Least appealing characteristic: Stalinist dictator, answerable to nobody but himself
Most likely to say: "Let's drop the big one and see what happens"
Least likely to say: "Life is very short and there's no time for fussing and fighting, my friends"