Talks with Mr Jiang and Mr Putin will be crucial as they constitute Pyongyang's only substantial friends in the world with leverage to influence its course. North Korea shares borders with both of these giants, and depends on China for food and fuel, and on Russia for balancing support against the US.

On the peninsula itself, the revelation that Pyongyang has been secretly enriching uranium for making a nuclear bomb erodes the base of Mr Kim's reconciliation drive, ahead of the December presidential election in which his favourite candidate is foundering at the opinion polls.

The North has seriously misread Washington's position in the debate. At the October 4 meeting with the visiting US Assistant Secretary of State, James Kelly, North Korea's First Vice-Foreign Minister Kang Sok-ju was evidently proposing a deal when he said Pyongyang would give up its nuclear ambitions for a package of US concessions, including lifting economic sanctions and opening diplomatic relations.

All this, said Mr Kang, was on condition that the US would end what he called the policy of hostility to the North. But Mr Kang could not have been serious.

Far from intimidating Washington, Mr Kang has confirmed the Bush administration's labelling of North Korea as belonging to the 'axis of evil'. The North was adding to the security threats against South Korea and the US, just as Washington was gripped by war preparations against another rogue state - Iraq.

Eight years after signing the US-North Korean Agreed Framework under which Pyongyang pledged to freeze its nuclear activities in exchange for two peaceful, light-water reactors to be provided by the South under an international consortium, President Kim Jong-il evidently finds himself as politically beleaguered as ever.

Economically struggling and politically marginal, he feels he has been short-changed, with the US delaying other promises, such as diplomatic recognition and the lifting of sanctions.

On Monday, on the eighth anniversary of the Agreed Framework's signing, Radio Pyongyang denounced Washington for refusing to honour these provisions in the accord.

Evidently, according to analysts in Pyongyang, the North sees itself steadily collapsing with neither the US nor South Korea coming to its rescue.

That may explain Mr Kang's renewed nuclear brinkmanship: he was attempting to produce a new round of talks by trading uranium-enrichment processing for a new package of concessions. These would include US recognition of the Pyongyang regime, economic aid to keep it from collapsing, and opening doors to multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank so that the North can start rebuilding its shattered economy.

Through its new policy review, however, the Bush administration has a clearly defined road map that it hopes the North will follow in order to benefit from its survival package. First of all, Washington wants the North to end its nuclear programme. Next is the end to missile exports.

The North considers both evidently unacceptable; the uranium-enrichment programme is one of the few levers it has to attract serious attention from Washington. In fact, the nuclear option is the only instrument it has to be considered a serious security threat to deserve respect and urgency for negotiation.

Washington also rejects the North's argument that development of long-range missiles is its sovereign right, especially after it test-fired a medium-range Taepodong-1 missile over the skies of Japan in August 1998.

Now the US and Japan are troubled by the likelihood of the North developing nuclear warheads small enough to mount on vehicles, prompting Mr Koizumi to say that Japan will not offer any economic aid unless the North clearly desisted from its nuclear programme.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell is taking a firm line against Pyongyang's threat of 'nullifying' the Agreed Framework. If the North insists it has been 'nullified', then so be it, is his attitude. 'When you have an agreement between two parties, and one says it's nullified, then it's hard to see what you do with an agreement,' he said.

It was a warning to Pyongyang that its bluff can be called, and brinkmanship answered. All this may have the desired effect of telling the North to back off.

What does appear certain now is that the North's calculated risks on the nuclear issue have fundamentally shaken Kim Dae-jung's reconciliation drive. It has left him picking up the shards of his broken policy, as domestic political pressure builds on him to condemn the North and insist that it disarm.

The consequences of ignoring this advice will be enormous for the North: it could lead to the loss of 500,000 tonnes of heavy oil from the US under the Agreed Framework, and losing close to one million tonnes of relief grain shipped by the US, Japan and South Korea to keep its 22 million people from renewed famine.

As Kim Jong-il ponders the opportunity cost of keeping his nuclear ambitions alive, the daunting question he faces is whether North Korea can survive another wave of death from famine that has already killed more than one million people in the past eight years?

It is an implication the whole world is pondering.

Shim Jae Hoon is a Seoul-based journalist