Beijing, China ? It’s been called an “evil state,” a “psycho state” and even a “Soprano state” that survives on crime, like the fictional television mob family.

Its leader, Kim Jong Il, once a movie director, has come up with an extraordinary plot line: Steer a totalitarian, bankrupt regime to develop nuclear weapons, then use cunning to ride out international sanctions and keep a firm grip on the nukes.

The final episodes have yet to unfold: Will the protagonist dare to put a bomb atop a missile and fire it? Will he try “nuclear blackmail” to extort billions from his neighbors?

North Korea’s missile sales and illicit activity, its involvement in terrorism and its ability to seal off its people from the outside world and to hide the doings of its leaders all make it a nuclear nation worth fearing.

But the whispers in the West that the secretive Kim is crazy are simply wrong, experts say.

“Here’s a guy who is leader of a failed state with a failed ideology having survived with his father for the last 50 years pitting the major powers against each other,” said Ralph Cossa, the head of the Honolulu-based Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Pacific Forum.

“For a crazy man, he’s pretty successful.”

Test was triumph

His latest triumph came at 10:36 a.m. last Monday in a shaft about 1,180 feet under a mountain at the Hwadaeri testing facility near North Korea’s northeastern border with Russia. There, North Korea set off an explosion that experts say probably was a nuclear test. The relatively small size of the blast indicated that the test might have been a fizzle, but late Friday, CNN cited an anonymous U.S. official as saying there was preliminary evidence of radioactivity at the site.

Regardless of the test’s success, the shock value unnerved Western policymakers.

After all, North Korean intelligence agents killed 18 South Korean officials in Burma in 1983 and bombed an airliner out of the sky in 1987, killing 115 people.

In more recent years, the cash-strapped regime has turned to moneymaking endeavors such as peddling narcotics and fake Viagra, smuggling bogus Marlboro cigarettes and printing fake American $100 bills. It sells missile and weapons technology abroad, largely in the Middle East.

A profound mistrust between North Korea and the United States adds a hair-trigger feel to the crisis. North Korea believes that Washington is bent on its destruction.

“We are under extreme threat (from the) United States of nuclear war,” North Korea’s ambassador to Australia, Chon Jae Hong, said after the nuclear test. North Korean propaganda routinely is laden with threats against the United States.

Closed society

North Korea is more isolated than any other nation on Earth. For half a century, its million citizens have lived in a cocoon, sealed off from the world, knowing only “juche,” or self-reliance, first under the leadership of Kim Il Sung, the “Great Leader,” then under his son, Kim Jong Il, the “Dear Leader.”

The once-industrialized country has seen its factories deteriorate and stand empty from lack of electricity. Floods and poor management produced starvation beginning in the mid-1990s, and, though estimates are difficult, the toll is thought to have reached up to 2 million people. The economy took a turn for the better beginning in 2000 and agriculture improved, helped largely by fertilizer sent from South Korea.

Few tourists are permitted. Those who go must leave behind video cameras, cell phones and binoculars. Minders severely restrict what tourists can photograph.

Photos that get out reveal woeful poverty. Pictures at a Web site set up by Russian travelers to North Korea in July (www.fishmonger.ru/06-07-27) show peasants using rickety wooden carts with no tires on their wheels; they roll on metal rims.

Ordinary people have no access to newspapers or the Internet. TVs and radios are sealed so that they get only official broadcasts.

“All radios have fixed tuning that only allow three or four official channels,” said Andrei N. Lankov, an expert on North Korea at Kookmin University in Seoul. Defectors tell of North Koreans huddling alone under thick blankets to listen to radios smuggled in from China or North Korean ones they’ve tinkered with to get South Korean or international broadcasts, said Betsy Henderson of Radio Free Asia in Washington.

A huge army burdens the militarized nation’s paltry economy.

“A majority of men aged 17 to 30 are soldiers. Think about it. One million soldiers. The whole population is just 22 million people. You hardly see any young males in the countryside or the cities,” said Cui Yingjiu, a scholar on North Korea retired from Beijing University.

Cui knows North Korea as well as anyone. He was a university classmate of Kim Jong Il in 1961-64 in Pyongyang and visits the country about once a year.

Charismatic Kim

Cui described Kim as charismatic and strong-willed, popular with students, fluent in Russian and displaying a strong affection for Hollywood films.

“He had a big collection of movies even then,” Cui recalled.

Kim’s short, paunchy stature and upswept hair didn’t stop him on the social front.

“He’s not timid. He’s quite manly. … Girls regarded him as attractive,” Cui said.

When Kim took over power from his father, who died in 1994, North Korea was mired in crisis, struggling with the collapse of its benefactor, the Soviet Union. Kim steered the nation into criminal endeavors, allowing regime agents to ply the seams of global lawlessness.

U.S. officials say they’ve documented 50 incidents in 20 countries linking North Koreans, often diplomats, to drug trafficking.

More troubling, North Korea turned itself into a global “Missiles ‘R’ Us,” shipping entire advanced missiles or technology to anyone with a fat wallet.

Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan were beneficiaries, and U.S. officials labeled North Korea the world’s No. 1 missile proliferator.

Some of the earnings went into North Korea’s nuclear program, which it agreed with Washington to suspend in 1994 in exchange for vast energy assistance. North Korea stopped its plutonium production and put it under the watch of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, and halted work on two larger reactors. It resumed reprocessing plutonium in 2003, shortly after U.S. officials said North Korea had admitted that it had a secret program to create highly enriched uranium, another fuel for nuclear weapons.

Chess match with Bush

Kim now sees himself as locked in a chess match with Bush, two leaders with a propensity for strident language and a stubborn, determined view of the world, Cui said.

“Bush doesn’t listen to the United Nations. Kim is the same. He doesn’t listen to what Russia says, what China says, what the U.S. says. Don’t you think the two men are similar?” he asked.

If Kim is backed into a corner, Cui said, his regime is capable of selling one of his nuclear weapons to a terrorist group or sparking a calamitous war by bombing Japan. Many North Koreans, weary of their plight, wouldn’t object.

“They feel it’s better to go to war than to continue suffering,” he said.