"Tonight, inside the world's most secretive nation," "North Korea¡¯s supreme commander, Kim Jung Un, is threatening thermonuclear war against the United States." "With tensions escalating," "Panorama spends eight days undercover inside the most rigidly controlled nation on earth." "So welcome to the real North Korea." "A landscape bleak beyond words, and a regime apparently marching towards Armageddon." "But is this talk of war for real?" "Or a regime afraid for its own survival playing a shadow game?" "We may see a thermonuclear war." "I am sure it is not the North Korean plan to unleash that kind of thing, but it might come to that as the result of a disastrous miscalculation." "We are flying into the strangest nation on earth, unstable, paranoid, aggressive, and after its latest nuclear test in February, even China, its old ally, voted against it in the UN." "No wonder North Korea is fast running out of friends." "Journalist are all but banned in North Korea, so I am going in undercover, part of a tour group." "Guide number one, the regime¡¯s human face." "It¡¯s immediately clear we have come to North Korea at an interesting time." "Our guide number two says hello." "They were both our guides, and also our ever vigilant escorts." "We are on an official eight-day tour, so the guide put us up in one of the top hotels in the Democratic People¡¯s Republic of Korea." "Pity about the lights." "This is the toilet, there are no lights, it stinks." "And here is the view outside the hotel, they are building a bank, night and day." "Day and night." "It's now four in the morning." "They never stop." "I am told it is a joint venture with a Chinese bank, a rare sign of inward investment?" "First stop, this is tourism Stalin style." "Joining us today is the trip¡¯s official cameraman." "He films us, we film him, he films us filming him." "This is a controlled society, but what is the ideology behind it?" "The official video they made about the trip, with their words and music, given to us at the end, provides a clue." "This is monument to party founding." "It was erected in October 1995 to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the workers' party of Korea." "So there is the hammer, there is the sickle, and there is the paintbrush, workers by hand and by brain." "It feels like symbols of an old religion." "The main square." "Many seen North Korea as a communist state." "One years ago, Marx and Lenin still had pride of place, but this year, on our trip, they have gone." "Now you seen them, now you don¡¯t." "So what sort of system is this?" "North Korea has a higher share of the population in uniform than Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had until the Second World War, so I think it is much more accurate to look at North Korea as a far right state, an ultranationalist state." "It is deeply, richly biased." "Koreans are taught that they are superior." "Kim Jung Il was an unabashed admirer of Hitler and copied him quite consciously, down to details like the Nuremburg marchers, which are staged in Pyongyang to this day." "At the mausoleum, tourist are banned from taking cameras in." "Kim Il Sung has been dead these past 19 years, but he still calls the shots." "As far as I know, it is the only nation in the world ruled by a dead man." "The generalissimo, Kim Il Sung, is still the leader of the country." "But he is a corpse." "I am sorry, you don¡¯t understand the North Korean ideology, the religious nature of this." "He is a kind of God." "He lives eternally." "As does his son, Kim Jung Il, Kim 2, who lies in his own glass box." "When he died nearly two years ago, his youngest son, Kim Jung Un, then 28, took over the family firm." "Kim the third was schooled in Switzerland, became a general at 27, and has linked his staff firmly to the military." "So North Korea is ultranationalist, militaristic, and its leaders are Gods." "It is a worrying combination." "In North Korea, if you say the wrong thing, you will die." "You will be sent to a political prison camp." "Even if one knows, sees or hears something, one must pretend to be ignorant." "Disagreement isn¡¯t an option." "Disagreement means death." "The ideology may be terrifying, but does this place really work?" "At this bottling plant, on the production line, no production today." "The military seems to work." "On the road, anti-aircraft guns." "Next, time to pay homage to Kim the first." "By bow, it is what expected given the godlike status of the Kims." "It is at the entrance of what we are told is a collective farm." "You get the feeling that this is not an ordinary farm." "I might be wrong." "So where are the crops, the fields, the animals?" "Instead, propaganda drums out from loudspeakers all day long." "So what about the farm workers?" "Where do they live?" "They show us some model hams, complete with model family, model kitchen, and a fridge full of food." "But this didn¡¯t seem to have anything to do with farming." "Pretty much a real-life farming experience!" "Off to a spa hotel, set aside for the regime¡¯s worthies and foreigners like us." "Breakfast, in a gilded cage." "We sneak out of our spa hotel, the barb wire separates us from the locals." "North Korea is one of the poorest places on earth." "So welcome to the real North Korea." "Life is bleak here, no reliable power, no freedoms as we know them, not even to travel to the capital without permission." "The more we see, the worse it gets." "Our tour guides are anxious for us not to capture the poverty." "Here a woman washes clothes in an icy river." "People scavenging in mud." "And if this is a market, there was not much on sale." "No smoke from this chimney." "It looks as though it has been idle for some time." "They take us to a showroom for this giant industrial complex." "They make electricity generators here, they say." "There goes the electricity again." "We ask for a tour of the factories." "To us they use the war as an excuse when things go wrong." "Do the do the same with their own people?" "When you talk to North Koreans about the status of their country, a lot of them recognize that North Korea is very backward and very poor." "But they tend to blame that on outside interference," "American sanctions, and indeed if a light bulb blows in Pyongyang, people will say, blame America." "Day four." "It¡¯s good morning Pyongyang!" "Until we switch on the TV news." "That very morning, we cross into the DMZ, the demilitarized zone, where North Korea stops and South Korea starts." "It¡¯s the most dangerous place on earth, some say." "Our guide agrees." "This is what the fuss is all about, the border with South Korea." "Today it does not feel like a battlefront, no movement, no maneuvers, no big guns." "But the DMZ¡¯s history is at the root of the North¡¯s current paranoia about America." "In 1950, North Korea, supported by Stalin and Mao, invaded the south." "The Americans, the British and others helped the South fight back." "Fire bombards by tanks, and here by Canadian gunners, have been effective in blasting the Reds from strong positions." "Three years later, and 1 million dead, the border was back to where it had been, the 38th parallel." "The two sites declared a ceasefire, but there has never been a peace treaty." "Here, who started the war still matters." "I asked if it might have been the North." "That's..." "That's not true." "It's not true." "NO, it's not true." "But is there going to be another one?" "In Britain we are less afraid because we are further away." "Something gets lost in translation." "North Korea first tested a nuclear bomb seven years ago." "Now their latest propaganda claims their rockets could hit the US mainland." "In reality they could hit South Korea, Japan and possibly American bases in the Pacific." "At the border on a day when Pyongyang is boasting its rockets are primed and ready to fire, it could not be more peaceful." "But on the far side of the blue huts, something is missing." "Usually, the South Koreans on guard, sometimes Americans, too." "Today it is eerily quiet." "At the moment this is a war of words." "Will there be a shooting war?" "But for now, they are relaxed enough for tourist snaps." "Next stop, a few miles north of the border, it¡¯s that man again." "Kim the first¡¯s cult of personality is everywhere, reforming people¡¯s thoughts." "It certainly would appear that the North Koreans are brainwashed." "When you talk to North Koreans, you can have a normal conversation and think I'm really dealing with a human being, and then all of a sudden they go into this robotic like recitation of North Korean policy" "and you¡¯ll want to shake them and say, come on, get real." "But the resigns of the regime¡¯s icy crib on information is beginning to crack." "This is a strange thing, is an iPhone, and you can pick up a signal, from the South" "If I can do this, so can a North Korean." "The country now has 1 million mobile phones, officially blocked from international calls." "But all this makes it harder to keep people brainwashed." "Mobile phones are very important in communicating information quickly about what is going on inside North Korea." "I suspect you would find that the chattering class in Pyongyang know very quickly about events that happen in the North East." "This is quite a big change." "A night out in Pyongyang." "Our guide has a lullaby for us, the nation¡¯s reunification song." "As the regime talks up thermonuclear war, our other guide sets out the Sinatra doctrine." "Back at the hotel, the power is off again." "Now you don¡¯t see the lights, now you do." "Look at this shot taken from space." "Compare the night sky." "The North puts out a sad glowworm, the South blazes with light." "A few miles south of the border, it is as if you are on another planet." "Welcome to South Korea." "As you can see, it is just like North Korea." "Well, it might be a bit different." "In South Korea, they have got all sorts of things they don¡¯t have in North Korea." "Shops, adverts, individuality, freedom of religion, freedom to go for a walk." "There are 25,000 defectors from the North here." "The question is, why aren't there more?" "I am here to meet a doctor from the North, who is now free to speak, albeit anonymously." "South Koreans wonder why North Koreans do not rebel." "Brainwashing starts in the womb." "It becomes natural to bow to the portraits of the Kims every morning." "Back in the North, on the outskirts of Pyongyang, we pass a military convoy." "And in town, they are testing the public address system." "Something is going on." "We have seen loads more soldiers in town today." "It is very difficult to film, but you can feel the tension rising." "The problem is, it is impossible for us to ask what's really happening." "We don¡¯t know." "Instead there is a trip to the People¡¯s Library." "I ask for one particular book." "1984." "Or any English books." "George Orwell predicted a world where the threat of constant war kept the masses subdued." "No 1984, but they have got Discovering Food and Nutrition." "Grimly ironic, because though you would not know it in Pyongyang, mass starvation is the regime¡¯s darkest failure." "In the 1990s, North Korea lost its old mentor, the Soviet Union." "The economy collapsed." "It suffered one of the worst famines in modern times." "Maybe 1 million died." "Maybe more." "But images like this would never be shown in North Korea." "This man escaped seven years ago." "Back then Ji Seong Ho was starving." "While stealing coal from a train to sell for food, he fell under the train's wheels and lost a leg and a hand." "I think I lost my mind from dizziness, sleep deprivation and hunger." "My grandmother and my neighbours died of starvation." "When you went into the cities, train stations, markets and alleyways, you found lots of dead bodies." "I do not know the exact number, but countless people died." "Countless." "Officially the famine was downplayed, but malnutrition continues." "Two years ago, the UN estimated that 6 million people, a quarter of the population, needed urgent food aid." "We are on the road again, heading over the mountains east." "Due north of here is something our guides would never ever show us, the North Korean gulag." "These shocking images appear to speak to life-and-death inside the regime¡¯s concentration camps." "Panorama has tracked down a defector brave enough to go on camera to tell his story." "Jung Gwang Il was a prisoner in Camp 15." "How did they bury the dead in the winter when the ground is cold?" "No." "We don¡¯t bury them." "We leave the dead bodies in a warehouse until April." "We bury them in April." "When we go to bury them, they are already rotten and totally decomposed." "So they are shoveled like rubbish and buried." "How many bodies in one whole in the ground?" "Up to 70 to 80 people." "Has the new leader acted to close down the gulag?" "Far from it." "Defectors say the camps are getting bigger, not smaller." "Day seven, we have been taken out of the city." "In Pyongyang they stage a military parade." "The regime is shaking his fist at the world." "For us, a ride on the Metro." "No ads, and it just so happens to be the deepest in the world." "Handy if the war ever did go nuclear." "This is the first moment we bump into ordinary North Koreans." "Even in the tube, the regime's wall of sound never lets up." "There are times when it feels like we are inside a doomsday cult." "The papers are full of warmongering and martial songs." "But the military-first policy has a price." "On the day the regime orders its forces on standby, they take us to one of the country¡¯s biggest hospitals." "Here the doctor says they can care for 1300 patients." "In the mausoleum, it was light and warm." "And in the hospital?" "It is freezing." "At least the power is on." "But it has gone again." "They show us a series of fancy machines." "A CT scanner, UV lights, but something is missing." "We have not seen a single patient." "Why there are no patients here?" "What?" "No patients." "Normally they treat the patients in the morning." "So, why aren¡¯t we allowed to see them?" "We asked a doctor who defected about her experience of North Korean hospitals." "If you, as a doctor, had said we need more money for medicine, for the patients, what would have happened to you?" "If that happens, they would kill me, the next day or even that same day." "They would kill you regardless of your ranking." "Even a high-ranking official would be killed." "Everyone knows that." "It is the end of our tour, and we still have not seen any patients." "Tell the doctor we are not fools." "We have not seen any patients." "Please don¡¯t treat us in this way." "The doctor explains we cannot see patients without their permission, but we cannot ask for that without seeing them." "Catch 22." "Then they take us for a treat." "And who should I bump into in the stalls?" "What feels like the entire North Korean officer core." "Top billing at the Circus, soaring above a trapeze, a rocket." "The officers go wild." "Do they mean it?" "Or are they too, putting on a show?" "The people are indoctrinated to believe that North Korea must exercise military power." "When I lived there, we used to say, it would be better for war to break out so everyone can die together and see the end." "But what if this high war act, blaming foreign enemies for its own failures goes wrong?" "North Korea is on a collision course with United States and South Korea." "We may see a thermonuclear war, but it wouldn't be because the North Koreans wanted it." "But it might come to that as a result of a disastrous miscalculation." "North Korea¡¯s military-first philosophy has its own peculiar logic." "The untested leader of the soldier state must threaten war to stamp his authority, at home and abroad." "Unless China, his major ally, reins him in, there is a danger that he could take that logic too far." "Kim Jung Un is not yet fully in control, I think." "He needs to keep showing that he is strong." "He wants to be the North Korean leader who forces the United States to come to the negotiating table on North Korean terms to admit that North Korea is a nuclear-weapon state, and preferably to give North Korea large amounts of aid." "My friends in North Korea say that they cannot live any more." "He keeps insisting that he wants a war when the markets are closed and there is nothing to eat." "On the day we left, North Korea declared a state of war with its neighbour." "For the moments, Kim the third remains, armed with nuclear powers." "The most dangerous man on the planet."