"The great powers – the USA, the USSR and the People’s Republic of China – continued to exert an impact on communism around the world. Nowhere was this more obvious than in east Asia. North Korea survived as an independent state because Washington knew that Moscow and Beijing would intervene militarily if ever an American attack took place. Until the early 1970s Korean communism had an economy which performed as well as most Marxist-Leninist countries. Gross national product was roughly the same in the two halves of Korea, communist and capitalist, in the previous period. North Korea had an impressive export trade, especially in equipment for foreign armed forces. This was a highly militarised society. Conscription kept well over a million men under arms at any given time. Party leader Kim Il-sung was accorded almost divine status. Mass rallies of joyful citizens praising his achievements and expressing gratitude for his wise rule were frequent. The ‘Great Leader’, the party and the masses were said to be in unison. Yet North Korea suffered economic atrophy as the military share of the budget got fatter. (Meanwhile South Korea experienced a boom as its imports of advanced technology and finance from Japan and the USA paid off.) Civilians went hungry throughout the north; even rice began to fail to match the state’s requirements for consumption. Kim would not be deflected. He calculated that the best way of getting co-operation from neighbouring countries was to make his armed forces feared in the region. Research and development were initiated for the acquisition of independent nuclear weapons. Labour camps were expanded in population. Millions of Koreans, in the north as in the south, had been cut off from their families since the Panmunjom agreement of July 1953. The Koreans of the north might as well have been living on a different planet, so little did they know about the situation in the south."