North Korea would be a lot better off if it could export legal products as good as its counterfeit Viagra.
The country's ruler, Kim Jong-il, cannot admit that his father's celebrated economic doctrine of juche, or self-reliance, has failed.
He keeps the country tightly sealed and pretends all is rosy while one-third of the population is so desperately short of food that it is suffering from malnutrition, according to the United Nations World Food Program.
One result of this socialist triumph is that the country has an economy estimated to be the size of Tasmania's combined with Canberra's. Twenty-three million North Koreans live off as much activity as generated by just three-quarters of a million people in Australia.
Just across the demilitarised zone, in democratic capitalist South Korea, live people with an average income of $37,000 in one of the world's most successful economies, while North Koreans forage for weeds.
But Kim still needs to pay for his cognac - Hennessy XO, according to his former Japanese chef - and for the oil and munitions to keep his million-man army ticking over. So he covertly exports an Aladdin's cave worth of contraband. Kim Jong-il's regime smuggles out counterfeit US dollars produced on a Treasury-quality printing press.
It sells nuclear know-how to anyone who will buy it, with past customers including Syria and Iran.
It exports heroin, as Australia discovered in 2003 when it intercepted a North Korean freighter, the Pong Su, after a four-day chase and found 125 kilograms of the drug in its purest form. And it makes and sells Viagra. And not just the pharmaceutical-grade stuff that you can get at any old chemist.
In a 2005 sting, the US staged a mock Mafioso wedding on a yacht which existed only on a website. The organisers invited a swag of known North Korean and North Korean-affiliated traffickers in all sorts of contraband.
Incredibly, almost all of them came. When they arrived in Atlantic City en route to the yacht, Kim's mobsters discovered that the nuptials were as genuine as the US dollars in their suitcases.
The American authorities moved in and charged 59 with offences including carrying $US4.5 million ($6.3 million) in counterfeit US dollars, millions of dollars worth of counterfeit cigarettes, plus industrial quantities of drugs including ecstacy.
One of the North Korean agents was caught with two suitcases full of fake Viagra. One of the cases was intended as a wedding gift for the lucky couple. The other was an export order.
According to a US official involved in the operation, the counterfeit Viagra was tested in a government laboratory. The result? It was made with the same ingredients as the Pfizer original, but was about 30 per cent more potent. The proceeds of the rackets feed the regime while the people starve.
In truth, Kim doesn't so much run a government as a criminal network holding hostage a long-suffering population. And, of course, every criminal network needs armed protection. Kim's is protected by his nuclear bomb.
Nothing yet has deflected Kim from his determination to field a nuclear missile. We know he has the bomb because seismologists confirm that North Korea detonated a small nuclear device underground in 2006. And we know that it is still working to perfect long-range missile technology because of the limited success of its launch on Sunday - the rocket fell well short of its target.
Experts tell us that North Korea is extremely unlikely to be able to put a nuclear warhead on a missile - yet. That would require a sophistication and miniaturisation the authorities tell us will take years for Kim to perfect.
But we know Kim will keep trying. He uses his nuclear program as a negotiating device. The Clinton administration, with the full concurrence of US allies including Australia, tried to bribe him out of the program. He took as many of the bribes as possible then reneged on the deal.
The Bush administration, calling Pyongyang part of the "Axis of Evil", tried to intimidate Kim out of the program. When that failed, it tried to negotiate him out of the program with a regional pressure group led by China, North Korea's main ally. As the negotiations proceeded, Kim was rewarded with increasingly generous support from South Korea.
But Sunday's launch was a declaration that the so-called Six-Party Talks have failed, too. Now Barack Obama is trying another approach. He is proposing to lead the world in a nuclear non-proliferation campaign, much as Kevin Rudd has been proposing for the past couple of years.
Obama is offering to cut the US nuclear arsenal, and will ask the world's other nuclear states to follow suit. He will ask all nations to ratify covenants promising to cease all testing and proliferation of nuclear weapons.
He evidently hopes that rogues like Iran and North Korea will ultimately join the movement in pursuit of international legitimacy. Obama said in his Prague speech that a nuclear-free world would not be achieved quickly, "maybe not in my lifetime".
We can be sure of one thing. It will not be achieved in Kim Jong-il's lifetime. We can only hope that, after the 67-year-old's apparent stroke last year, that might not have much longer to run. Even the world's best Viagra can only produce a counterfeit youthfulness.
Peter Hartcher is the Sydney Morning Herald's international editor.
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