It appears to be heading for a showdown with the United Nations over its refusal to let experts check a military complex the West suspects of producing nuclear weapons material yesterday, less than a week before the deadline for inspections runs out, it had made no move to grant access to the site.
'We are heading closer and closer to March 31 and there has so far been no change in their fundamental position,' an International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman, David Kyd, said yesterday. If there was no change by then, the agency's board of governors would have to refer the question to the Security Council, he added.
Pyongyang 's withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), should be seen in the context of earlier actions: failing over decades to repay either Western or communist creditors, and routinely having diplomats smuggle to supplement their meagre salaries.
The philosophy of juche, usually translated as 'self-reliance', in practice denotes a unique degree of politically autistic behaviour.
Such behaviour has been North Korea 's undoing. Already abandoned by the Soviet Union before its demise, it now sees Russia going so far as to moot military ties with South Korea.
China too has changed sides in Korea: not only recognising the southern regime in 1992, but tacitly recognising that Seoul will in the end prove both a better friend and a lot more useful than Pyongyang has ever been.
Beijing, with oblique but unmistakable comments about the universality of the NPT, is joining the efforts to put pressure on North Korea to play by the rules.
It is in character that North Korea 's commitment to the NPT had all along been patchy. It only signed 1985, reportedly at Soviet insistence, and then delayed for several years drawing up the safeguards agreement to allow IAEA inspections. This prevarication aroused suspicions which were not allayed by intelligence suggesting that dubious activities were taking place at Yongbyon, about 45 miles north of Pyongyang .
A breakthrough came in late 1991 when South Korea announced the withdrawal of US nuclear weapons from its soil - a claim Pyongyang now professes to disbelieve. Shortly after North Korea signed not only a safeguards agreement with the IAEA but also a separate treaty for mutual nuclear inspections with South Korea.
While the latter has yet to be implemented because of unresolved differences, the IAEA process went smoothly enough for most of 1992. Six ad hoc inspections have been made so far, and at first North Korea was unexpectedly forthcoming with information. What the inspectors saw, however, convinced them there was more they were not seeing.
In February the IAEA gave North Korea a month to open for inspection two other sites, which Pyongyang insists are non-nuclear military facilities. It is this which prompted the North's withdrawal from the NPT.
What is Pyongyang 's game? Almost certainly it has been seeking to build a bomb.
But much murkier are the follow-up questions: how far have the North Koreans got? Are they still at it? And what might they do with nuclear weapons?
It is not impossible that the whole thing might be a gigantic bluff - a desperate attempt to appear to have an ace in a hand which has otherwise been left entirely without cards worth playing.
More plausible, however, is the interpretation that North Korea broke with the IAEA for the same reason that it earlier suspended dialogue with South Korea: both were on the brink of getting serious, and North Korea is not yet ready - and perhaps never will be - to either abandon its bomb or start serious exchanges with Seoul.
There is also an internal dimension to North Korea 's withdrawal from the NPT, and to its general new tone of belligerence. Kim Il Sung may have learned from his old friend the late President Sukarno of Indonesia that konfrontazi is a useful distraction from domestic woes.
This is the final year of North Korea 's current seven-year plan, which is not remotely in sight of any of its targets.
Nor is the regime's rule necessarily secure. The appointment of Kim Il Sung's son and heir, Kim Jong Il, as commander-in-chief in 1991, as well as being unconstitutional, was not well received by the officer corps because of his lack of military experience. The attention later lavished on the army, including the present crisis, may be an attempt to placate the one force capable of mounting a putsch.
The regime faces an intractable dilemma. For Kim Il Sung, it is the frying pan or the fire. Clearly, North Korea 's present trajectory is going nowhere, except into the abyss. With all aid now cut off by exasperated creditors and former comrades alike, the command economy has shrunk by up to 5 per cent in each of the last three or four years, and is close to collapse.
There is, of course, a cure for the seizing up of over-centralised planning, as China and Vietnam have found. The fact that the Kims have hitherto set their faces against economic reform bespeaks not so much an incurably Stalinist mentality as a very accurate appreciation of the immense risks to their rule which would follow any opening.
What Chinese hardliners call 'the flies blown in on the wind' would in North Korea be plague-bearing mosquitoes, fatally infecting a regime founded on an absolute quarantine against the outside world.
Aidan Foster-Carter is a senior lecturer in sociology at Leeds University and director of the university's Korea Project
