Understanding the youngest man who can launch a nuclear weapon

Shanghai: Officially aged 29, but probably only 26 or 27, he is the youngest man in history with the power to launch a nuclear weapon.

But the man who appears to have risen smoothly to become North Korea's "Supreme Military Commander", the title bestowed on him on Friday and confirmed by the country's ruling politburo on Thursday, is a worrying blank to most of the outside world.

Days after his father was laid to rest, Western intelligence agencies are scrambling to learn more about Kim Jong-un, the man who will decide whether his country remains an impoverished, dangerous and isolated state or whether it begins a difficult process of reform and modernisation.

Inside North Korea, the country's secretive regime has begun honing propaganda messages about the new leader.

Until two years ago, when the ailing Kim Jong-il began the frantic search for his heir, almost no attention was paid to his third and youngest son. No one outside a tight-knit and secretive circle knows his precise age, whether he has a wife, or even with certainty who his mother is among the various women who married, or were mistress to, his father.

Some reports suggest she was Ko Yong-hui, a former dancer who may not have formally married Kim Jong-il but who nonetheless served as North Korea's "first lady" until her death, believed to have been from breast cancer, in 2004.

She is said to have doted on her son, calling him the "Morning Star King". Standing by the side of his father's hearse, photographs of the younger Kim beamed around the world revealed him to be a stern and portly man; his gaze impassive and his lips pursed into a grim pout. A more realistic picture of the young Kim is painted by his old school friends from Switzerland, his fellow pupils at the German-speaking Liebefeld-Steinhoelzi school in Berne. Talking in the wake of his elevation to North Korea's leadership, they said he was "always good for a laugh" but frankly, a bit "dim".

Basketball

"He was a big fan of the Chicago Bulls [US basketball team]. His life was basketball at this time," said Joao Micaelo, the son of a Portuguese diplomat who sat next to the young Kim as they both struggled through their German classes.

"I think 80 per cent of our time we were playing basketball."

He said he had not heard from Kim for a decade, but that they used to watch kung-fu movies together, play computer games, and eat the food cooked up by Kim's private chef. When Kim confided to him that he was, in fact, the son of the North Korean leader, Micaelo did not take him seriously. "I only knew him in his alibi mode until one Sunday afternoon, just before he left for home in 2000."

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2012