By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA, Associated Press Writer
North Korea announced a scientific breakthrough on Friday, and it had nothing to do with the missile tests that startled the world this week. Researchers developed a new cosmetic agent to make skin supple, state-run media boasted.
"They analyzed in a scientific way why the hand skin of those who are making bean paste is smooth and fair," state news agency KCNA reported. Armed with the data, scientists made an agent that helps fight wrinkles and lightens moles and freckles, it said.
North Korea, a destitute and reclusive country, seems to inhabit an alternate reality that is disconnected from the deprivation of its own people, let alone the world beyond its tightly guarded borders. Few North Koreans other than the elite get enough to eat, or have the income to splurge on beauty products.
The bombastic, blinkered view of North Korea's media and government help explain why it believes the missile launches Wednesday were a legitimate act of self-defense and a sovereign right, rather than a provocation that triggered global alarm.
The perspective exists in a virtual time warp, little changed from the 1950-53 Korean War, the first shooting conflict of the Cold War. It feeds on national pride as a counterpoint to North Korea's backwardness, and revolves around a deep-seated suspicion of its old battlefield foe, the United States.
"North Korean diplomats justified the missile launch by asking rhetorically why the U.S. launched the (space shuttle) Discovery as if there is some equivalency between the two," arms control expert Mark Fitzpatrick wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
"They also insist that the U.S. has nuclear weapons in South Korea pointed at the North. That is nonsense; former President George Bush withdrew all nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991," wrote Fitzpatrick, a fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
North Korea could have cause for concern in hostile rhetoric from the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, as well as the fate of another U.S. foe, Saddam Hussein. Some U.S. officials would like to see regime change in North Korea, but Washington says it has no intention of invading or attacking.
"All the facts prove that the military movements of the United States to unleash a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula at any cost have reached the extremely dangerous stage," KCNA said Thursday, citing an alleged 1,000 U.S. spy flights against North Korea in the first half of the year.
From kindergarten children to People's Army troops, an almost mechanical hatred toward Americans is part of life. But it's unclear to what extent the animosity is a genuine passion, or manufactured by the state to unify the populace and ensure its own survival.
North Korea's twin worlds of image and reality clash all over Pyongyang, where colorful murals depict women with rosy cheeks and workers and soldiers clutching guns, flags and farm implements, conviction on their clear-eyed, square-jawed faces.
The truth is that many citizens, who walk long distances because transportation is scarce, have a weary, subdued demeanor. Hungry children are growing up stunted, smaller than their healthy peers in South Korea, the North's wealthy neighbor and benefactor.
The personality cult that bestows mythic status on leader Kim Jong Il, who inherited power from his father and late national founder Kim Il Sung, is another example of the bubble mentality. North Koreans extol his virtues in massive parades and stadium performances at which he and top government and military leaders are the only spectators.
Magnolia Hall, a palace where Kim entertained then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000, has a garage with marble walls and pillars. The brightly lit interior is almost blinding, an irony in a nation where electricity is in short supply.
Bean paste is a staple of Korean cooking, and the North Korean scientists who designed the cosmetic agent might be onto something because beans are used in some skin care products around the world. But the invention is a modest achievement alongside the fast pace of innovation that has catapulted South Korea, another old rival, into the ranks of the world's top economies.
As much as North Korea seems out of touch with reality, it also displays guile and calculation in its efforts to extract economic concessions and other benefits from the outside world. The missile tests were one such example.
"Pyongyang either was not fearful of the threatened consequences or, more likely, having flaunted international protocols so often in the past without serious repercussions... assumed that the latest threats are also hollow," Ralph Cossa, head of the Hawaii-based Pacific Forum CSIS institute, wrote in an analysis.
