At home he is idolised as a "great man with clairvoyant wisdom". Elsewhere, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il looks like a cornered man who has a dangerous infatuation with atomic bombs.

Is the isolated leader, who was probably felled by a stroke last year, so at odds with an outside world tired of his ambition to be a nuclear warrior that he will give up years of rhetorical war and launch the real thing?

Or will he just give up - to save himself and his exhausted economy?

Neither is likely, according to diplomats, analysts and officials. They say he is no more suicidal than he is driven by worries the 23 million North Koreans he rules with an iron fist might fall deeper in poverty because of the international sanctions that followed his latest military grandstanding.

For some, Mr Kim's government is not so much feeling threatened as playing a well-practised game of who-blinks-first, rolling out the nuclear threat to win another set of concessions from a world struggling to deal with a leader who has little else to bargain with.

"I don't think they view themselves as stuck in a hole, although objectively they very well may be," said Balbina Hwang, a Washington-based former aide to the US chief negotiator with the reclusive North.

Pyongyang's punishment for May's nuclear test includes the threat of renewed, and painful, exclusion from the global banking system and humiliating checks of its ships on the high seas for weapons - its one major export.

Several analysts make the point that the North, with some justification, believes it has emerged victorious from all its skirmishes with a hostile world, from the 1950-53 Korean War stalemate to financial rewards for delaying its nuclear weapons programme.

There is little so far to change the North's expectations that its latest mix of recalcitrance and sabre-rattling will - if it holds out long enough and can rely on China to baulk at really harsh sanctions - win more time and more money for a government whose survival hinges on not changing its ways.

Mr Kim is unlikely to abandon years of bankrolling the military - at the expense of the rest of the population - to ensure its protection of him and, more recently, for his son to take over the family dynasty which began with Mr Kim's father.

If anything, the latest round of belligerence has probably bolstered the standing of a man whose domestic media devotes the bulk of its efforts to brushing up his personality cult, such as a glowing article about his clairvoyance in predicting rain.

"Kim Jong-il continues to need to reinforce his power," the South's Unification Minister Hyun In-taek said in a recent interview, saying social instability was on the rise. Some argue that the government is almost irrelevant in the lives of ordinary people and that its communist-inspired command economy no longer functions.