Kim Jong-il apparently not dead

The consensus of opinion now is that North Korea's Kim Jong-il is indeed still alive. Kim's sudden disappearance from public life in August, and the uber-secretive nature of North Korea prompted a lot of speculation that the ‘Dear Leader’ had suddenly died.

But North Korean television has shown a spate of public appearances in the past week, including one that could be definitively dated to December 16 (Kim's TV appearances are usually undated, part of their whole obsession with secrecy), which now makes most analysts believe that Kim is still alive and in control of the country. It's now generally thought that Kim, who is 66, suffered a stroke sometime in August and spent the last few months recovering. North Korean TV showed only still pictures of Kim, making some believe his body movements might have been affected by the stroke.

Who will come after Kim Jong-il though is still an open question. The BBC put together a list of possible candidates. His expected successor was to be his oldest son, Kim Jong-nam, that was until the younger Kim was caught in 2001 trying to sneak into Japan on a fake passport to, of all things, visit Disneyland Tokyo. Not surprisingly this caused a drop in his father's respect for Kim Jong-nam. Dear Leader Kim is now said to favor his number three son, Kim Jong-un, though selecting him could be difficult since tradition dictates leadership pass to his eldest son first. And as the BBC notes, any successor to Kim Jong-il needs the support of both the Communist Party and the military, the two pillars of the North Korean state.

Meanwhile, a report published today says that North Korea might already have enough plutonium to make four or five nuclear bombs. That tidbit comes from Selig Harrison, a North Korean expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who said he was told about the plutonium by North Korean military officials. There's no way of verifying the claim, but it is widely believed that North Korea was actively refining uranium to make weapons-grade material for the past few years, so it does seem plausible.

But if their 2006 nuclear test is any indication, maybe we shouldn't worry too much about North Korean A-bombs. That test explosion was a ‘fizzle’, or a nuclear dud (and yes, fizzle is the technical term for such things), that yielded less than one kiloton in explosive force. By comparison, the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima during World War II was equal to 20 kilotons, or 20,000 tons of TNT, in explosive force.