It's literally a billion-dollar gamble. Far more than mere money is at risk, but that's the amount - US$1 billion - that South Korea's Hyundai Corporation has invested in its mammoth tourism development in the Diamond Mountains of North Korea.
A real-life hermit kingdom whose residents are the most isolated society on Earth, North Korea is a nation of 23 million people, where few have ever heard of The Beatles, or Elvis, or Jackie Chan. And most have never been told that man has landed on the moon.
For decades, the combined governments of China, Japan, the US, Russia, and South Korea have toiled mightily in an effort to bring the last Stalinist regime into the fold of civilised nations. Conventional wisdom, particularly in the west and led largely by the US under President George W. Bush, has been to isolate and ostracise the country in the way that Cuba and South Africa were for generations.
Yet where conventional wisdom has clearly failed on the Korean peninsula, tourism may well succeed. Or at least it may be helping to reduce the risk of outright conflict.
The catalyst for Hyundai's massive project took place six summers ago, when the company's founder, the late Chung Ju-yung, sent 500 cows from South Korea, through the demilitarised zone, as a donation to the famine-stricken people of North Korea.
According to company legend, when the North Korean-born Chung was a teenager he stole money from his father - cash his parents had been saving to buy a cow. The young Chung took the money to Seoul in the hopes of earning his fortune there. But the Korean war began before he could return home, and the unpaid debt haunted him ever since.
