The country whose ideology is "juche", or self-reliance, has depended on food aid for much of the past decade to feed many of its 23 million people. Hundreds of people died in a famine that started in 1995 and went on for years.

Refugee aid group Helping Hands Korea has warned that North Koreans may again face famine this winter as disenchanted international donors cut back on aid after missile tests in July and a nuclear test on October 9.

South Korea suspended regular rice and fertiliser aid shipments after the missile tests and continued the suspension after the nuclear detonation.

Officially the North, which since its creation in 1948 has maintained a policy of unrelenting hostility to Washington, blames US threats to attack it and weaken it through sanctions for its test.

But its policy of Songun, or "army first", may also have played a large part. The slogan first appeared around August 1998 when the North alarmed Japan by launching a long-range missile over the country.

"It has maintained this rhetoric, prompting some to speculate that internal divisions led (leader) Kim Jong-Il to try to solidify his position in the eyes of his million-man army," the International Crisis Group wrote in a recent report.

Kim may also have used the nuclear test to rally public support before what is expected to be a hard winter. The "Dear Leader" is widely believed to be less popular than his father and founding president Kim Il-Sung -- the Great Leader.

Kim Il-Sung died in 1994 after fostering a personality cult bordering on idolatry, but officially remains president for eternity inside his mausoleum.

The younger Kim took over leadership of the ruling party in 1997 amid acute economic difficulties.

The economy, already burdened by the cost of the world's fourth largest military force, shrank in 1997 for the eighth successive year since the collapse of communism in former benefactor the Soviet Union.

The younger Kim opened the reclusive state to some degree, including a landmark summit with South Korea in 2000.

Two years later the regime introduced limited reforms to the centralised command economy, allowing some flexibility in state-set prices and granting incentives to workplaces and workers.

But in October 2005 it banned private grain sales and announced a return to centralised food rationing.

At the end of 2005 the North suspended the World Food Programme's 10-year emergency programme and severely curtailed its activities. Food aid now comes mainly from China and South Korea and energy from China.

Outside Pyongyang, where the elite and other privileged classes largely live, life remains harsh. A US State Department report said the nation "continues to suffer chronic food shortages and malnutrition."

The North's rights record is also widely condemned.

A United Nations panel last month cited "torture, public executions, extrajudicial and arbitrary detention, the absence of due process and the rule of law, the imposition of the death penalty for political reasons, the existence of a large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labor".