North Korean rhetoric now regularly includes casual mention of a nuclear-weapons program. Only two years ago, the North talked about scrapping nukes in the six-party talks. Now, Kim Jong Il's intent, China's role in curbing Mr. Kim, and the future of the talks are under deep study.

Kim has "a decision to make" about his nuclear ambitions, says Christopher Hill, the US point man on East Asia. Meanwhile, President Bush sent a peace message to Kim, via South Korean envoys, that may arrive Friday.

Yet in Pyongyang, little is known of global debates or policy about "rogue states." No discussion or window to the outside world exists in what is called "a propaganda state."

Sources in Pyongyang say foreign events are unknown, and public opinion doesn't exist. Weekly air-raid alarms continue, as they have for 50-plus years. Today, more mobile vans with loudspeakers are blaring messages for citizens to "be alert." Elites can read a June 14 Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) saying the spirit of the Korean summit would bring a "radical turn in the standoff with the US."

Otherwise, the place is closed, with prison sentences for those caught listening to shortwave broadcasts like the BBC.

This week, the focus of what passes for news in Pyongyang was the rice harvest; much ink was also spilled on a finger ring made of glass that reflects the sun's rays, and is talked about as a potential hot Korean export.

In fact, if it is true that Kim Jong Il must make a nuclear decision soon (and some experts feel he is quite happy to stall and delay), only a tiny elite knows this. Foreign news appears on only one page of the national daily, Rodong Sinmun, and this paper is not sold on the street. It is offered by subscription, and only to a circle of approved recipients; foreign news is removed from papers distributed outside a few large cities.

"There's been no change in internal propaganda in the past month," says a diplomatic source in Pyongyang. "No change in the usual war propaganda, or messages about the US. There's no 'nuclear crisis' spoken of here."

To a nearly inconceivable degree, North Korea operates on propaganda. The control of expression in Kim's regime is so tight that neighboring China, which has 42 journalists in jail and constantly polices and deletes political speech, seems dizzyingly free by comparison.

In the Kim Jong Il state, propaganda is more important than military or economic factors, experts and former residents say, involving cradle-to-grave demands for personal loyalty to the Kim family, and an elaborate cult ideology of Kim worship.

Only when the founder of the North Korean state, Kim Il Sung, put his son Kim Jong Il in charge of propaganda in the 1980s was it clear that the young Kim was being groomed to rule.

"The Kim family has spent 60 years constructing the propaganda machinery. Kim Jong Il more than anyone is responsible for making this semireligious thought monopoly continue," says Jasper Becker, author of "Rogue Regime." "That's why its hard to imagine change there; that would mean allowing North Koreans to come face to face with reality."

Political messages center on the United States as an enemy state whose military presence in Korea is entirely aimed at preventing the reunification of Koreans, according to Stephen Bradner, a US military adviser in Seoul.

Rhetoric gets rough at times. A June 8 KCNA release refers to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who criticized the North last week in Singapore, as "ignorant of diplomacy.... He seems to know nothing but war. So he'd better go to Iraq with a rifle in hand if he has nothing to do."

"Editorials like the Rumsfeld bit are aimed just as much at a domestic audience as an international one," says Krzysztof Darewicz, a Polish journalist who reported from Pyongyang for five years during the 1990s.

"It is designed to tell the people: 'We are powerful, we can talk like this to the US, we are ready to win a fight, and most important, we are not afraid because we have a bomb,' " he adds.

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