It's been four decades since Pyongyang's Kims came to understand the grave threat to their job security posed by South Korea's rapid development.
The first- and second-generation leaders responded with campaigns to double and redouble northern output, haranguing workers with propaganda in hopes of proving the superiority of the socialist system. They failed miserably at that, but stubbornly refused to resort to the reforms adopted by China, Vietnam and other former communist countries.
For a while, pouring a huge proportion of their resources into conventional military buildup gave the northerners an edge that only US forces' backing of the South could offset. Meanwhile, though, the South Koreans, by focusing their resources on the economy, were becoming rich enough to build a competing military financed with what to them was relative pocket change.
Experts these days don't see North Korea winning an actual war.
After those strategic failures by his father and grandfather, third-generation leader Kim Jong Un is reduced to mind games involving shrill threats - psychological warfare that may soon be seen as a transparent ruse in part or whole but in the meantime has frightened foreign investors in the South.
Markets tumbled in recent days and the CEO of General Motors publicly acknowledged he would consider moving his company's South Korean car production elsewhere.
Pyongyang has shown it is "capable of controlling the international agenda while inflicting significant economic harm on South Korea without firing a shot," Seoul-based American business consultant Tom Coyner says. "We are witnessing a ground-breaking example of psychological warfare using the media."
Other experts agree, having watched as the North warned foreigners to evacuate Seoul as a prospective nuclear war zone and, earlier, hit Seoul banks and newspapers with cyber-attacks.
"If this is psywar - and I think it is - it has worked, in the sense that North Korean threats have never gotten this much American and South Korean media attention since the Korean War itself," says David Straub, former State Department Korea specialist and now associate director of Korean studies at Stanford's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.
