Kim Jong-Nam, the half brother of Kim Jong-Un who took control of the hermit state on the death of their father last month, says the military has become so powerful it will step in and take over.

The comments come in a book by Yoji Gomi, a Japanese journalist who says he built a relationship with Jong-Nam after the pair met in Beijing in 2004.

“My father Kim Jong-Il and Me” will be published in Japan by Bungeishunju on Friday.

“North Korea is very unstable,” Jong-Nam told Gomi, who interviewed him at length in the Chinese territory of Macau last year.

“My father governed the country with the backing of the military, but the power of the military has become too strong,” he said in Korean. “If the succession ends in failure, the military will wield the real power for sure.”

In the book, based on email exchanges and interviews, Jong-Nam says North Korea’s troubled state-managed economy presented the regime with a dilemma.

“It is obvious that (the) economy will collapse without reforms, but the reforms will lead to a crisis of the collapse of the regime,” Jong-Nam said in the interview carried out before the death of his father Kim Jong-Il on December 17.

He also claimed that his inexperienced brother Jong-Un was likely to be merely a symbol used by ruling elites to maintain their grip on power.

“Anyone with normal thinking would find it difficult to tolerate three generations of hereditary succession,” he said an email, which Gomi says was sent on January 3.

“I question how a young heir with two years (of training as a successor) would be able to inherit… absolute power,” he said.

“It is likely that the existing power elites will succeed my father by keeping the young successor as a symbol.”

Jong-Nam has lived in virtual exile in China for many years after falling out of favour with his father, who in turn inherited the rule of the impoverished country from his own father.

Two years ago and with his health rapidly deteriorating, Kim Jong-Il moved Jong-Un — believed to be in his late 20s — into the position of designated successor, giving him military posts and raising his profile.

Jong-Nam did not directly respond to questions over whether he attended the elaborate funeral and memorial ceremony for his father, but Japanese media have said he visited Pyongyang after learning about his father’s death.

Gomi said Jong-Nam may still take the reins of power in the secretive state with the backing of Beijing, which frets that a collapse in the regime could send millions of starving North Koreans over its border and create nuclear havoc on the peninsula.

“He has been protected by the Chinese side,” said Gomi, a senior staff writer at the Tokyo Shimbun who was previously based in Beijing and in Seoul.

“If the Jong-Un regime collapses, (China) appears to be planning to send him to Pyongyang and make him become the next leader,” he said.

Gomi said he had decided to go ahead with publishing the book despite requests from Jong-Nam for a delay.

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Some media outlets in the South have claimed North Koreans who did not participate in organised public mourning, failed to cry, or did not appear genuine, have been sentenced to at least six months in labour camps.

But Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Saturday said such “misinformation” touched off “towering resentment” among North Koreans, denouncing those who spread the allegations as “pitiable human scum”.

“The group of traitors hell-bent on the anti-DPRK (North Korea) campaign could hardly understand the weight and sincerity of the tears shed by the service personnel and people of the DPRK,” KCNA said.

The reports originated on Daily NK, an Internet website run by opponents of North Korea, which said it had learned the information from a source in the isolated communist state’s northeastern province of North Hamkyong.

In recent weeks the North has accused the South’s government of showing disrespect during the mourning period for Kim, who died on December 17 and was succeeded by his son Jong-Un.

Relations have been icy since the South accused the North of responsibility for two deadly cross-border incidents in 2010.

On Thursday, the North’s state Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said Lee’s government had escalated confrontation and staged a smear campaign.

It said the South Korean military was put on alert following the announcement of Kim’s sudden death and accused the Seoul government of “levelling the gun at the fellow countrymen shedding tears in great grief”.

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The North fired the KN-02 missiles, which are usually deployed against ground targets and have a range of about 75 miles (120 kilometers), into its eastern waters on Wednesday, a Defense Ministry official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of ministry policy.

Japan’s Sankei Shimbun newspaper first reported the tests.

North Korea regularly conducts short-range missile tests, but the latest came as it tries to consolidate new leader Kim Jong Un’s grip on power after his father Kim Jong Il’s death on Dec. 17.

North Korea has made it clear that it will continue Kim Jong Il’s “songun,” or military-first, policy under the leadership of Kim Jong Un, and a steady stream of propaganda has sought to portray the young leader as a confident military commander. There has been uneasiness about his rise among the North’s neighbors and in Washington.

North Korea conducted a short-range missile test hours after it announced Kim’s death on Dec. 19.

Wednesday’s tests were seen as part of the North’s attempts in recent years to improve the range and accuracy of its short-range missiles.

“If the North wanted to send a message, it would have fired a greater number of longer-range missiles,” said Kim Jin-moo, a North Korea expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses inSouth Korea.

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The unification ministry, which handles cross-border relations, said one of its policy priorities this year was practical preparations for reunification including the fund.

In a policy document it also vowed actively to engage in “reunification diplomacy” by garnering international support for Seoul’s policies and seeking to share the experiences of Germany.

The ministry gave no details of who would pay into the fund, which has been previously mentioned, or its size.

The issue of how to finance the potentially huge cost of reunification came to the fore in 2010 when the South’s President Lee Myung-Bak proposed a special tax.

Estimates vary widely on the cost of reuniting the prosperous South and the impoverished North, which have grown apart for the past six decades.

Per capita income in the communist North is about five percent of that in the capitalist South.

A study sponsored by the ministry has estimated that basic welfare spending on North Koreans would cost 55 trillion won ($48 billion) for the first year after reunification.

The first-year figure could rise to 249 trillion won ($217 billion) — almost one quarter of the South’s 2010 national economic output — if medical costs, pensions and other benefits were factored in.

Kim Jong-Il’s death on December 17 and the power transfer to his young and untested son Jong-Un has revived debate on eventual reunification.

Surveys before Kim’s death showed waning enthusiasm among South Koreans, especially the young.

Unification Minister Yu Woo-Ik on Wednesday described the reluctance for reunification among young people as “very worrisome”, stressing that the long-term benefits would outweigh costs.

“Reunification is not a matter of choice but something we must do… it will be a cowardly historical act if we avoid reunification because of money,” Yu said in a speech to college students.

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And while Kim Jong Il’s death last month has raised those hopes higher among some in Seoul, few are eager to talk about the cold reality: Sudden reunification could be traumatic for both countries.

Any North Korean collapse and hurried reunification, analysts say, could spell the end of Pyongyang’s ruling class while flooding Seoul with refugees and causing huge financial burdens — perhaps trillions of dollars — for South Koreans who have only recently gotten used to their country’s emergence as a rising Asian power.

Korea observers aren’t predicting such a collapse or the kind of “big bang” reunification that happened in Germany, which saw the overnight fall of the communist side and its swift absorption into its Western neighbor. The new North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il’s son Kim Jong Un, is fast consolidating power, winning key backing from the government and military.

Still, the extraordinary changes in North Korea following the Dec. 17 death of the man whose iron rule lasted 17 years have stirred up dreams of a single Korea among some in the South. And not just in those with memories of life before the country was divided into U.S.- and Soviet-occupied zones in 1945.

The Swiss-educated Kim Jong Un “is less allergic than his father was to introducing new ideas from the world. That will help ease isolation and open room for reunification,” said Bae Sang-il, a 36-year-old office worker. “A generational change is meaningful in North Korea.”

Many South Koreans support the idea of eventual reunification, but they seem more wary of the huge costs that will come with it.

A poll in South Korea late last year, before Kim’s death, showed just over half of those interviewed believed they would eventually be better off after reunification, although more than two-thirds said the costs are bigger than the benefits.

Both countries talk about reunification, but they have very different notions of what it would be.

North Korea sees it as a two-state federation, with each state abiding by its own rules and regulations but as one Korea.

South Korea and its U.S. ally would likely balk at anything other than a Korea that’s a liberal democracy, or at least moving in that direction.

From Seoul’s point of view, slow and steady are crucial for any successful reunification. A sudden reunification would be a serious blow for South Korea’s vibrant economy and well-ordered society.

South Korea, whose constitution enshrines the goal of reunification, will be much better off, analysts say, if it can gradually build up a North Korean economy that Seoul estimates is about one-fortieth its own size.

Officials in Seoul will be faced with a monumental set of problems, whatever happens. They will likely have to open up the North’s economy to trade and investment, quickly raise the living standards of millions, control the flow of North Koreans into the South, and retrain North Korean bureaucrats so they can help run the country under new policies.

This will be very expensive.

A South Korean government-affiliated institute said recently that the cost could be up to $240 billion after a year and up to $2.4 trillion after a decade.

South Korea’s president has urged his country to prepare for reunification by studying the possibility of adopting a tax aimed at raising money for the costs of integration. The idea has largely stalled for the time being.

The German model is often raised for Korea, but there are important differences.

Germans in the west largely footed the bill for reunification after the collapse of communism, bringing the overall infrastructure of the former East Germany up to a standard similar to that in the West.

North Korea’s population, however, is about half the size of the South’s, while East Germany’s population was only a quarter of the West’s, according to Erik Lueth, an economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland. East Germany, he points out, was one of the wealthiest of the Soviet affiliated states; North Korea is much poorer than the South, and there are estimates of widespread malnutrition.

Also, East Germany’s ruling elite, chafing under the Soviet yoke, was not averse to the idea of uniting with West Germany and even accepting its capitalist system. North Korean leaders, analysts say, won’t quickly accept a system that would take away their power and seek accountability for a rule that the United States and others say often trampled on rights.

“Reunification would be terrible for North Korea’s elite and wonderful for the North Korean people, although there would be a traumatic period of adjustment,” said Ralph Cossa, president of Pacific Forum CSIS, a Hawaii-based think tank. “For the top handful of North Korean leaders, reunification under Seoul would mean jail or worse.”

For South Korea, reunification “will no doubt be messy and costly, even if it comes with a whimper, not a bang,” Cossa said. Still, “living with a hostile, unpredictable, nuclear-armed North Korea is not much fun either.”

Reunification could also provide eventual benefits for the South’s economy.

Economist Marcus Noland at the Peterson Institute for International Economics describes a “peace dividend” that would come with a reduction in military tensions and the associated drop in military spending this would allow. The North also has abundant natural resources and a relatively well-educated and cheap labor force.

Predicting the future is, of course, a gamble, especially in a place as unpredictable as North Korea. That hasn’t stopped people from trying: Paddy Power, an Irish betting agency, is offering odds of 12 to 1 that Korean reunification occurs before 2020.

History, however, provides some potential clues about North Korea’s future. Despite famine, international isolation and outside skepticism, North Korea survived the 1994 death of Kim Il Sung, the North’s founder and father of Kim Jong Il.

“Now, despite a food shortage and economic hardships, the regime will probably be able to avoid a worst-case scenario due to unity among its top officials and assistance from China,” former South Korean Foreign Minister Han Sung-joo wrote recently in the Chosun Ilbo.

So reunification, at least for the time being, seems a distant dream. And that may be a good thing for Seoul.

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Campbell, the assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, is the first US diplomat to visit North Korea’s closest ally since the leader of the isolated state died from a heart attack on December 17.

Kim’s death has sparked concerns over the stability of the impoverished, nuclear-armed nation, where a famine killed hundreds of thousands of people in the 1990s and where severe food shortages persist.

A spokesman for the US embassy in Beijing said Campbell would be holding talks with vice-foreign ministers Cui Tiankai and Zhang Zhijun on Wednesday, adding the meetings were due to end later in the afternoon.

The spokesman told AFP on Tuesday that Campbell would “discuss a range of important bilateral, regional and global issues, including the latest developments related to North Korea and Burma.”

China is a key ally of Myanmar, also known as Burma, which has made tentative steps at reform by opening talks with the opposition and ethnic minorities.

But the future of North Korea is likely to dominate Campbell’s trip, which will also take him to South Korea and Japan before he returns to Washington on Saturday.

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A North Korean state television broadcast of the services showed a tearful Kim Jong Un, the son and chosen successor of Kim Jong Il, trudging through the snow alongside a black car, which carried a giant portrait of a smiling Kim.

Other senior officials followed, including Jang Song Taek, the younger Kim’s uncle and a vice chairman of the National Defense Commission.

Soldiers stood with their heads bowed, their caps in hand. Their green uniforms contrasted starkly with the bright white snow as mournful music played.

The procession sped up after it drew away from the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where Kim Jong Il’s body had been lying in state since his death earlier this month, reportedly from a heart attack. After about two hours, the cars reached Kim Il Sung Square, named after the founder of North Korea and father of Kim Jong Il.

The funeral cortege wove through the streets of the city, past throngs of emotional mourners lining the route. In footage that the state television repeated several times, the mourners wailed and beat their chests, their hair damp from the falling snow.

“That is our general,” said one soldier interviewed by the station. “In this snow, we have to send him off and it’s heart ripping.”

The snow also gave the country’s state-run media fresh material with which to eulogize the dead leader.

“The feathery snowfall reminds the Korean people of the snowy day when the leader was born in the secret camp of Mt. Paektu and of the great revolutionary career that he followed through snowdrifts,” the agency KCNA said in a report Wednesday, referring to a mythical tale of Kim Jong Il’s birth on a sacred mountain.

The North Korean media had attributed a number of supernatural feats and events to Kim over his lifetime.

“All streets in Pyongyang and all towns and villages throughout the country are now inundated with people sweeping away snow before bidding their last farewell to the leader,” the KCNA report said Wednesday. “They, who spent a sleepless night, missing him, have turned out in all roads covered by him in his lifetime.”

Analysts were ready to parse the footage for clues on the transition under way within the reclusive state.

The route the procession took appeared to follow that taken for Kim Il Sung’s funeral in 1994, reported Yonhap, the official South Korean news agency.

And it gave a prominent role to a third generation of the family: Kim Jong Un, the man designated the “great successor” by the nation’s Worker’s Party.

Questions have been raised about Kim Jong Un’s ability to take the reins of the communist nation, given his young age — he is thought to be in his late 20s — and relative inexperience.

State news media have described the younger Kim as “supreme leader” and “sun of the 21st century,” suggesting he is succeeding in rallying support within the regime’s hierarchy.

Denny Roy, a North Korea analyst at the East-West Center in Honolulu, said observers outside North Korea will be performing “the usual Kremlinology — except in this case it’s Pyongyangology.”

They will be watching the ceremonies for clues as to where leading figures stand in the new hierarchy.

“What I expect to see is no sign that there’s any hiccup or difficulty in Kim Jong Il’s plan to have his son Kim Jong Un succeed him,” Roy said before the funeral.

Jang Song Taek, who was shown walking behind Kim Jong Un on Wednesday, is expected to serve as a regent for the younger Kim as he builds leadership experience, Roy said.

The ceremony is to be followed by a memorial on Thursday. The state-run Korean Central News Agency said when the national memorial service is held Thursday, gun volleys will be fired in the capital as well as in provincial seats.

“All the people will observe three minutes’ silence and all locomotives and ships (those on voyage included) will blow whistles and those units with sirens will sound them all at once,” KCNA said.

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As the world watched Wednesday’s funeral of dictator Kim Jong-il, who presided over famine, a nuclear arms push and military skirmishes with the South, Choi Dong Jin, 48, told Reuters that Kim was “a great and outstanding person” for resisting U.S. imperialism.

Choi is Editor in Chief for the Pan-Korea Alliance for Reunification, a body that promotes the North and unification of the Korean peninsula.

He sits in his office in Seoul’s financial district, a smartphone on his desk, beneath a picture of Kim Jong-il in 2000 meeting former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, whose engagement with the North, known as the “Sunshine Policy,” has been halted by the current conservative government in Seoul.

“The presence of Kim Jong-Il had prevented the U.S. from waging a war on the Korean Peninsula,” Choi told Reuters.

Sympathisers like Choi risk arrest and imprisonment in South Korea even though they appear to be a fringe group.

Under the conservative administration of President Lee Myung-bak, 151 people were questioned for offences involving praising North Korea last year, up from 39 in 2007, according to the National Police Agency data.

By contrast, some 200,000 North Koreans are in forced labor camps for crimes against the regime, according to human rights group Amnesty International.

One member of a body campaigning against South Korea’s six-decade old national security law told Reuters that the succession process that will see the 20-something son of Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un, take power looked more “efficient” than South Korea’s democratic presidential elections.

In South Korea, a president can serve only one five-year term under the country’s constitution that was enacted since the advent of democracy in 1987.

MILITARY FIRST, JUCHE

“The military-first policy and Juche ideology have been protecting the Koreas from the corrupt U.S. power,” said a 58-year old construction worker, who wished to be known only by his last name of Kim as he feared arrest.

Juche is the North Korean policy of economic self-reliance. According to United Nations data, North Korea’s economic output is now smaller than in the 1990s under the administration of Kim Jong-il’s father, Kim il-Sung, who founded the state in 1948.

Kim Jong-il took power from his father in 1994.

Kim believes the line from North Korea’s state media that made the death announcement and said the 69-year-old died on December 17 on a train going to give “field guidance,” advice given out to the armed forces, factories and farmers.

“I was impressed by the revolutionary leader as he was working together with people to the end of his life,” he said.

He believes most news reports of North Korean hardship are fabricated as news organizations are biased toward the United States.

“Even if North Koreans are materially poor, I think they are mentally rich with their political system,” Kim said.

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Son and successor Kim Jong Un led the procession, his head bowed against the wind and right arm raised in a salute, from Kumsusan Memorial Palace where his father’s body had lain in state. Top military and party officials, including uncle Jang Song Thaek, were also part of the lead group.

The procession was expected to head to the city’s main plaza, Kim Il Sung Square, where hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have been paying their respects over the past 10 days. Sobs and wails filled the air as mourners in the front rows, bareheaded in the cold and snow, stamped their feet and cried as the hearse passed by.

Kim Jong Il, who led the nation with an iron fist following his fatherKim Il Sung’s death in 1994, died of a heart attack Dec. 17 at age 69, according to state media.

Even as North Koreans mourned the loss of the second leader the nation has known, the transition of power to Kim Jong Un was already under way. The young man, who is in late 20s, is already being hailed by state media as the “supreme leader” of the party, state and army.

State media declared the country in the “warm care” of his young son as it extended the Kim family’s hold on power to a third generation. Over the past week, state media has bestowed him with new titles, including “great successor,” ”supreme leader” and “sagacious leader.”

He is believed to have led a private ceremony earlier Wednesday in the inner sanctum of the Kumsusan Memorial Palace with top military and party officials. A national memorial service will take place at noon Thursday, state media said.

Like his father’s in 1994, Kim Jong Il’s coffin was wrapped in a red flag. A limousine carrying a huge portrait of a smiling Kim led the procession, and soldiers followed the hearse and lined the streets.

The footage was accompanied by rousing military music. The procession passed by a signboard with a slogan that praised the “revolutionary ideas of Comrade Kim Il Sung,” Kim’s father and the country’s revered founder. North Korean state media said the memorial route was about 25 miles (40 kilometers) long, though top officials did not walk the entire route.

Walking behind Kim Jong Un was Jang Song Thaek, Kim Jong Il’s brother-in-law and a vice chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission who is expected to play a crucial role in helping Kim Jong Un take power.

Kim’s two other sons, Kim Jong Nam and Kim Jong Chol, have not been spotted.

The young Kim made his public debut just last year with a promotion to four-star general and an appointment as vice chairman of the Central Military Commission of the ruling Workers’ Party.

Heavy snow was falling in Pyongyang, which state media characterized in the early days of mourning as proof that the skies were “grieving” for Kim as well. Footage on state TV showed images of swirling snow, the log cabin in far northern Mount Paektu where Kim is said to have been born and the mountain named after Kim Jong Il, where his name is carved into the rocky face in red.

Earlier, state television also replayed images of missiles being fired and the April 2009 long-range rocket launch that earned North Korea strengthened U.N. sanctions. The U.S., South Korea and other nations called it a test for a missile designed to strike the United States; North Korea said the rocket sent a communications satellite into space.

Even as they mourned his father with dramatic displays of grief at memorials and at Kumsusan, North Korea’s officials have pledged their loyalty to his son.

In an essay paying homage to Kim Jong Il on Wednesday, Workers’ Party mouthpiece Rodong Sinmun said North Korea under his leadership had been “dignified as a country that manufactured and launched artificial satellites and accessed nukes,” referring to the country’s nuclear program.

“Thanks to these legacies, we do not worry about the destiny of ourselves and posterity at this time of national mourning,” the essay said, carried in English by the Korean Central News Agency.

“Supreme leader of our party and people Kim Jong Un takes warm care of the people left by Kim Jong Il. Every moment of Kim Jong Un’s life is replete with loving care and solicitude for the people,” the essay said.

Wednesday’s procession had a stronger military presence than in 1994.

Kim Jong Il, who ushered in a “military first” era when he took power, celebrated major occasions with lavish, meticulously choreographed parades designed to show off the nation’s military might, such as the October 2010 display when he introduced his son to the world.

In the Chinese border city of Dandong, across the Yalu River from North Korea, dozens of people crowded into North Korea’s consular offices and into a North Korean restaurant across the street hoping to watch the funeral on television. Many were dressed in black and wore the Kim Il Sung badges common among North Koreans.

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Kim Jong-un only appeared with his father on live television for the first time last October, clapping and saluting thousands of goose-stepping soldiers at a military parade.

The third son of Kim Jong-il, Jong-un is believed to be around 27-years-old and was educated in Switzerland.

He lived under the pseudonym of “Pak Chol” while at the International School of Berne, and pretended to be the son of a driver.

Described as shy and uncommunicative, he was only known for his sporting passion – in particular a fascination with basketball and Michael Jordan. He was also known to have been a fan of skiing.

Not much else is known about his time at school – but by late 1999 he had simply disappeared from the country, according to former classmates.

Little else was revealed about him until June 2010, when North Korean officials began circulating photographs of him, taken while he was at school.

Prior to this, only one official image of him had circulated outside North Korea, apparently taken when he was around eleven years old.

Shortly afterwards, in September of that year, he was appointed a general of the country’s army – and it was then that the first official photograph of him as an adult was released.

This was followed by the television footage of him at a parade with his father a month later – the younger Kim’s military ‘coming out’ and an effort to boost his standing in what is one of the world’s largest armies.

Aside from what is known about his sporting and military pursuits, the younger Kim is also an unexpected fashion guru in his country.

His short-square haircut – dubbed the “youth” or “ambition” – is widely copied by young men in Pyongyang.

However, he is yet to make a significant impact in either his own country or on the global stage.

Although he has been selected by the country’s officials as the next leader, it remains to be seen if he can retain the firm grip his father had over the country, and most importantly, its military.

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