Drawing from the televisual simulacra of North Korea weapons provocations and projections of regime power, this chapter examines the emergence of a video-mediated nuclear North Korea in the new millennium within the broader frame of networked digital technologies that have facilitated South Korean media flows into the country. Military displays and the more recent emergence of the leadership's nuclear diplomacy can be evaluated as simulation, and is interrogated in the explicit context of a cultural moment when the people of the territorialised and retrenched nation-state of twenty-first century North Korea are receptive to South Korean popular culture and neoliberal productions (see also Chapter 5 about South Korean popular culture in North Korea).

This chapter highlights the opportunities and constraints of global media and information flows for the newly emerging society of ‘transnational Korea’ being built on capitalist imperatives and shaping hierarchical relations. In contrast to approaches that exclusively situate North Korea's nuclear weapons in the defence policy of the nation, this chapter reframes the North Korea missile ‘crisis’ in the era of Kim Jong-un as cultural expenditure, and as part of Pyongyang's comprehensive propaganda network. Within this configuration, military displays simulate state power at a historical moment when South Korea televisual media is the driving force behind prohibited North Korea leisure time. Mediated technologies, and their capacity to meticulously steer the social, illustrate the uneasy relationship between work and play, and state sovereignty and global flow.

North Korea has a long history of developing nuclear weapons, but the policy was not in the foreground until after the death of founder Kim Il-sung in 1994, and was not in public circulation as simulated deterrence in the digital video space until 2003 (Shim, 2017a), when new technologies were already weakening the boundaries of the state (Debord, 2002) and ushering in capitalist media. Prior to the new millennium, North Korea did not release missile images following testing events, a fact obfuscated by outside media's use of substitute images, including images of the wrong missiles, for the August 1998 launch of the Taepodong-1 and the May 1993 test of the Rodong-1 missile (Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation, 1993; 1998).