The current brinkmanship in East Asia - even if it is just diminishing due to special dates in the North Korean calendar - is a signal, how strong and urgent the domestic political struggle is going on: There are influential groups which are fighting for a place at the sun, at the Taedonggang Craft Brewery Bar in Pyongyang or in a VIP room in Macau. There are also informal networks which are helping to get a remittance inside and rocket engines outside - to name only a small part of the business. In other words: Society is changing - even in North Korea. The intelligence about it still seems to be poor, related to the stuff you can read or hear from Western intelligence agencies. I tried to describe a scenario where the old values of Juche are eroding and the new one change the system - hopefully: La voie nord-coréenne. Du Djoutché à la ploutocratie?, in: Courtois, Stéphane: Communisme 2013 - 1920-2012. Vietnam, de l'insurrection à la dictature, Paris 2013, pp. 411-420.
"Information at best will always be in some part fragmentary, obsolete, and ambiguous." (Armstrong, Willis C. (et al.): The Hazards of Single-Outcome Forecasting, in: Westerfield Bradford, H. (Ed.), Inside CIA's private world, Yale 1995, p. 242)