CNN Moderator: Welcome to CNN's Cold War chat with Mike Chinoy. Mike Chinoy is CNN's Hong Kong bureau chief, responsible for coverage of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and North Korea. Before setting up CNN's Hong Kong bureau in October 1996, Chinoy was Beijing bureau chief for eight years. In 1989 Chinoy received an Emmy Award, a Cable ACE Award, a DuPont Award and a Peabody Award for his coverage of the Tiananmen Square crisis. Chinoy has covered North Korea extensively, traveling there nine times since 1989, including covering former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's historic visit to Pyongyang in 1994, and he was the first broadcaster ever to file live TV reports from North Korea.

CNN Moderator: Mike Chinoy joins us now from CNN's Hong Kong bureau. Mike, you've traveled to North Korea 10 times -- when were you last there and was there evidence of lingering Cold War tensions?

Mike Chinoy: To a visitor to North Korea, sometimes it seems as if the war never really ended. In its propaganda, the North Korean government adopts a very strident and militant tone with its invective directed largely at the United States and South Korea. The North Koreans regularly castigate the United States for maintaining 36,000 soldiers in South Korea and for perpetuating the division of Korea, which was of course a product of the Cold War conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In fact it is fair to say that the Korean peninsula remains the last and still most volatile flashpoint of the Cold War era. North Koreans have more than 1.1 million men under arms on their side of the Korean Demilitarized Zone facing off against 36,000 American troops and hundreds of thousands of South Korean troops. The danger, the tension and suspicion of both sides triggering an armed conflict is real. The worries have been heightened by the fact that North Korea had some kind of nuclear program for many years which was widely believed to be aimed at developing nuclear weapons capability. So the bottom line is that the Cold War may be history in most of the world, but it's alive and well on the Korean peninsula.

Chat Participant: Mike, do you believe that the U.S. is a hindrance rather than a help to reunification on the Korean peninsula?

Mike Chinoy: Koreans in both the North and the South are deeply nationalistic. The division of Korea in 1945 over which they had no say is a wound both in the physical sense dividing the county and at a deeper emotional and psychological level. I'm struck having traveled a great many times to the North and to the South at how deeply Koreans of all political persuasions feel about their country's continued division. The question of what role the United States plays now in this situation depends on your broader political perspective. From the North Korean point of view, the presence of American troops and American support for the South Korean government is blocking reunification along North Korean lines. From the point of view of many in South Korea, and from the point of view of the United States, the presence of American troops is a stabilizing force that is deterring any North Korean attempt to reunify the peninsula by force. And it's also protecting the more open and democratic capitalistic system in the South.

Chat Participant: Do you think the recent ICBM launch, which turned out to be a satellite launch, is a tangible proof of its capability to produce intercontinental missiles?

Mike Chinoy: There are still lots of questions about the North Korean launch, but it does seem clear that North Korea has the technological capability to launch a two- or three-stage missile that can travel far greater distances than previously the North Koreans had been thought capable of operating. This could in a very significant way change the strategic environment because it means that, in a time of conflict, North Korean missiles would be capable of reaching Japan and beyond.

Chat Participant: Do you feel that North Korea will collapse now that the Cold War is over?

Mike Chinoy: Good question. With the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, market-style reforms in China and the death of North Korea's longtime leader Kim Il Sung in 1994, many believed that North Korea would follow its former communist allies into oblivion. My impression, though, is that the North Korean political system is not likely to collapse in the near term. A combination of extraordinarily tight political control, ideological education that amounts to mass brainwashing of the population, and the country's almost total isolation from the rest of the world for almost half a century, create a different dynamic in North Korea. As long as the North Korean armed forces and the ruling elite stick together, my sense is that the system can survive despite the changes in the rest of the world and its own acute economic difficulties and current food crisis.

Chat Participant: Mike, what are the chances that the famine in North Korea may cause the leadership to launch a war out of desperation?

Mike Chinoy: Certainly, one of the fears is that a collapsing North Korean regime would attack the South as a last act of desperation. So far, though, the food shortages, despite the human suffering, have not produced a direct political challenge to the regime. For the moment, North Korea's strategy seems to be to press for diplomatic and economic concessions from the United States to guarantee its survival. Therefore, at the moment, I would rate the chances of a sudden unexpected attack of the North Koreans on the South as relatively low.

Chat Participant: Mr. Chinoy, will you be granted permission interview Kim Jong Il or Kim Yang Nam in the near future?

Mike Chinoy: I met Kim Il Sung, the late former president, on three occasions. CNN has repeatedly requested an interview or at least a meeting with Kim Jong Il. So far though, we have not been allowed to meet or interview him, although I have seen him from a distance at public gatherings. He is a very enigmatic figure, and certainly our hope is to be able to meet him and interview him at some point in the future, but that decision is entirely up to the North Koreans.

Chat Participant: What do you make of the recent news of underground construction, possibly relating to nuclear activity, in North Korea?

Mike Chinoy: It's very hard to know what to make of these reports. There seems to be no doubt that American intelligence has detected some major underground construction project. The North Koreans have made building underground sites of one sort or another something of a specialty over the years. When I was in North Korea, officials denied that this site had anything to do with the country's nuclear program. But there is simply no way to tell at this stage. If the underground site is shown to have some link to a hidden or revived nuclear program, the diplomatic consequences will be potentially very dangerous because it will likely prompt the United States to take a much tougher line toward North Korea and heighten the possibility for conflict.

CNN Moderator: North Korea is the first communist country where power has passed from father to son -- is North Korea under Kim Jong Il in any way a different communist country?

Mike Chinoy: The North Korean brand of communism is in many ways different from that practice anywhere else in the world. The North Korean system is more like a religious cult with the trappings of traditional Korean Confucian dynasties and the strict political organization of a Leninist one-party state. But in the worship of a godlike leader, and the dynastic transfer of power from father to son, North Korea is very unique compared with other communist systems around the world.

Chat Participant: Mr. Chinoy, how much longer do you think communism will last in North Korea?

Mike Chinoy: All North Korea watchers wonder about the longevity of the regime and the system. It's unquestioningly facing an acute economic crisis. And the collapse of communism almost everywhere else has left it even more isolated internationally. However, almost a decade after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, North Korea still survives, confounding the skeptics. And my sense is it can survive a good bit longer, though no one can predict whether, when and in what form the system may come to an end.

CNN Moderator: How isolated is the North from its former Cold War allies, the Soviet Union and China?

Mike Chinoy: North Korea relied very heavily on China and the Soviet Union for its economic well-being and has been badly hurt by the end of its special relationship with both countries. It can no longer count on automatic diplomatic or political support, and both Moscow and Beijing now look with some distaste on North Korea's peculiar political system. By the same token, though, China in particular does not want to see North Korea collapse because of the danger to regional stability that would create. So the Chinese are still providing a significant amount of food and economic aid to try to keep the North Korean system afloat.

Chat Participant: What effect, if any, do you think that U.S. military exercises in South Korea have on North Korea?

Mike Chinoy: The North Koreans get very agitated at these military exercises. North Korea always worries that it will be a target of attack by the U.S. and South Korea, however implausible that may seem to outside observers. At the same time, though, the bluster and angry rhetoric from North Korea are designed to intimidate South Korea and the U.S. into scaling back and diminishing their military readiness.

Chat Participant: How would the Chinese perceive the collapse of North Korea to be destabilizing?

Mike Chinoy: The danger in any collapse in North Korea is that it could trigger upheaval on the peninsula. Depending on how it happened, you could have internal conflict within North Korea, a possible flood of refugees across the border into either China or South Korea, or, in the nightmare scenario, a desperate and collapsing North Korean regime might launch an attack on the South. For a China whose primary goal is stability in order to promote economic development, all of this is bad news.

CNN Moderator: What would Seoul like to see happen in North Korea over the next few years?

Mike Chinoy: The South Koreans have a very ambiguous attitude about North Korea. On the one hand, at an emotional level, they'd just like to see the system fall apart and the country be reunified -- in a way, not all that different from what happened between East and West Germany. On the other hand, even before the Asian economic crisis, the potential costs to South Korea of having to absorb an economically devastated North were already enormous. Now with South Korea in serious economic trouble, the last thing it wants or needs is to face that kind of prospect. This is one reason why the new South Korean president, Kim Dae Jung, has adopted what's become known as a "sunshine policy" toward North Korea. Under this policy, Kim has encouraged economic links between North and South and sought to ease tensions. The idea is that if the North economy can gradually recover and the level of tension be reduced, the overall environment on the peninsula will improve and unification -- if it were to come down the road -- would be a far less traumatic process.

Chat Participant: Mr. Chinoy, do you think that a collapse in North Korea could in some way jeopardize U.S.-Chinese relations?

Mike Chinoy: The U.S. and China have similar interests in trying to prevent developments in Korea that could re-ignite conflict. I think both countries are keen to see North Korea open up, begin to have a greater contact with the rest of the world. Precisely to reduce the chances that turmoil in Korea or the collapse of North Korea could fuel tensions either within the region or between Washington and Beijing.

Chat Participant: Mr. Chinoy, would North or South Korea benefit more from a reunification of the two countries?

Mike Chinoy: It depends how you define the terms of reunification. Clearly for the political and military elite in the North, any reunification that did not keep them in power would provide no benefit whatsoever. For the South, the economic cost of reunification would be immense. In the longer term, though, reuniting a nation that, until a half century ago, has never been divided would be rectifying a great historical wrong and virtually all Koreans would support it, but there is no simple, easy or pain-free way to achieve that process. And my own feeling is that for all the yearnings for reunification, it's not likely to happen any time soon.

CNN Moderator: Do the people -- as opposed to leaders -- on both sides want reunification?

Mike Chinoy: There is a strong emotional feeling among most Koreans for reunification as best I can judge from visiting both places and all the years following it. But when you get down to specifics, the terms, the practical arrangements, the costs, what kinds of systems would apply to a reunified Korea, all of these are very tough questions, and we shouldn't forget that it was partly over questions like this that the two Koreas went to war 50 years ago. So it's too simplistic to talk about reunification without keeping these issues in mind.

Chat Participant: Do North Koreans know how stagnant and detached they are from the entire world?

Mike Chinoy: I think it's hard to judge what the North Koreans do and do not know and do and do not feel. When we travel there, our contacts with ordinary people are very strictly limited. Our movements are tightly controlled. We are required to have a government guide with us virtually everywhere we go. So it's really very hard to judge what North Koreans think. Certainly, the elite, who do have access to outside information, including CNN, must be aware of the differences. For ordinary people, certainly they must be aware of how grim their lives are, but a half century of isolation and indoctrination mean that a great many North Koreans do not in fact have a very clear idea of what life is like beyond their borders.

CNN Moderator: Will history look upon North Korea as a political dinosaur -- a leftover of Cold War tensions?

Mike Chinoy: I think it's fair to say that North Korea is a relic from a different era, and its continued survival almost a decade after the ending of the Cold War is a surprise to lots of observers. It's hard to judge how history will look at North Korea. It is the product of both the history of Korea and the Cold War conflict that together helped to create this extremely unusual and in some ways bizarre society.

Chat Participant: Mike, I have read your book and found it very interesting. I would like to ask if the North Koreans sealed the invasion tunnels under the DMZ.

Mike Chinoy: The South Koreans have periodically over the years uncovered tunnels that the North Koreans had been digging. Although I've been to the northern side of the DMZ a few times, I have no way to judge the current state of those tunnels.

Chat Participant: Are the people in Hong Kong living better or worse since China took over?

Mike Chinoy: The situation in Hong Kong today is full of irony. The conditions for a lot of people, and the overall situation in the territory, has gotten worse. But the problems Hong Kong faces have very very little to do with the handover to China and a great deal to do with the broader Asian economic crisis. The downturn in the Hong Kong economy caused by the regional turmoil has been the primary factor for the slump in the stock market, declining property prices, rising unemployment and growing anxiety about the future. But many of the concerns voiced around the time of the handover, such as possible curbs on freedom of the press, civil liberties, political activities or Chinese direct interference in the daily life of Hong Kong, have not materialized.

Chat Participant: If another conflict erupted between the Koreas, how would the U.S. and China and the rest of the world respond?

Mike Chinoy: I think it would depend partly on the nature of the conflict. The attempt would be made obviously to resolve it so it did not expand and could be contained. It is not in the interest of U.S., China or Russia for there to be conflict in Korea. But by the same token, if it involved a major North Korean attack on the South, the U.S., because of the presence of the 36,000 troops in the South, would be immediately involved and would be expected to react accordingly.

CNN Moderator: That concludes our Cold War chat with CNN Hong Kong Bureau Chief Mike Chinoy, who joined us live from Hong Kong.