Will submit my personal experiences to the autism brigades with some speculation of my own.

"We" call the town mentioned on the border "propaganda village." It has no real residents and exists to broadcast propaganda messages over the border to South Korea. It pretty much sets the tone with North Korea being a sort of shell game. The buildings at the border are no different. Last I heard, there was a $1M bounty on a 1x1 meter section of the flag that flies over Propaganda Village.

There was a treaty signed after a spurt of who can build the taller dick left the Norks penniless. South Korea's visitor center can't be taller than North Korea's. As such, the building you see from the South Korean side is a facade. The Norks only have about a 1 meter thick building over there with some utilitarian structure behind it.

You have your typical roads to nowhere and other fun stuff communists do to keep people busy, but it is a shell of a country with exceptionally little activity - aside from their border guards shooting over the border on a daily basis (public reporting doesn't cover this… but bullets fly over there far more often than you would suspect).

I noticed some electronic equipment mounted on poles and it was mentioned that cell phone jammers were in play by the Norks, as well as Elint.

Unlikely these were in-house jobs, spare for the jammers.

Who subsidizes that?

Why?

My thinking is more geopolitical.

South Korea is a major world economy and produces the 3-hull tankers the current energy market relies on.

A … Dale Brown book, if I remember correctly, speculated about the hazards of a submarine-mounted nuclear weapon were detonated in Pusan harbor. This is a plausible threat, in my opinion.

What happens when North Korea takes headlines?

Who does a rogue NK threaten?

North Korea recently began active nuclear weapons testing after that wonderful Iran deal (anyone remember who it was who put the current regime in charge - used to be a nearly post-Muslim Persia before the CIA got their hands on it). Remember Stuxnet?

Equation Group? Gray Fish?

North Korea puts its handler in a position to wag the dog. It's a very powerful geopolitical tool. Perhaps a surface-level observation, but one that is sufficient enough in my estimation.

Consider that North Korea now sits within range of something close to 90% of the world's silicon die manufacturing… and it is an ideal place to have a little slice of hell to threaten people with.

They don't need a high performance ballistic missile to do damage - or lead people to believe them capable of it.

That said, I am extremely skeptical of their actual military capacity on the whole, and I don't think Jong Un is fully complicit - or trusted enough to be given much more than means to make a show.

That is all North Korea seems to be… something just plausible enough to prepare for, but largely incapable of acting - the tail that wags the dog.

That said… it wouldn't be the first time some great idea from the brain trust gained independent thought and began doing its own thing. If they lost control of the Presidency, they can lose control of the people they equip to kinda-sorta build nukes, too. It's kind of their MO at this point… lose control of a great idea and delude themselves into thinking it makes it an even better idea worthy of more resources.