Analysts and political scientists love scenarios and North Korea is just made for them. And North Korea's military and nuclear potential mean the rest of us definitely need some idea of how to act. These four visions of the future are outlined by Dr Aidan Foster Carter, head of the Korean Studies Programme at Leeds University, and Pyong Yang watcher for 30 years.
War is clearly one possibility, whatever negotiations are in progress.
Growing famine across the country also increases the chances of two other outcomes, implosion and Soviet-style glasnost . The last option is that things stay the same . Deterioration seems so dramatic that it would be easy to discount this option. On the other hand, many regimes have inflicted enormous punishment on their peoples and survived. The Nazis in Germany and Khmer Rouge were defeated by foreign armies, not civil insurrection, and Stalin, the murderer of 10 million or more, died peacefully in his bed.