In the seaside city of Wonsan, North Korean families cook up barbecues on the beach, go fishing, and eat royal jelly flavored ice cream in the summer breeze. For their leader Kim Jong Un, the resort is a summer retreat, a future temple to tourism, and a good place to test missiles.

He is rebuilding the city of 360,000 people and wants to turn it into a billion-dollar tourist hot spot. At the same time, he has launched nearly 40 missiles from the area, as part of his accelerated tests of North Korea's nuclear deterrent.

"It may sound crazy to outsiders to fire missiles from a place he wants to develop economically, but that's how Kim Jong Un runs his country," said Lim Eul-chul, an expert on the North Korean economy at Kyungnam University in South Korea.