North Korean Video Imagines What It Would Be Like to Wipe Out a U.S. City

Alexander Abad-Santos 9,165 Views Feb 5, 2013

North Korea likes to drop hints about annihilating the United States with nuclear weapons, but just to make it clear, they've produced a helpful propaganda film to show exactly how that's going to go down. The video—which was posted on one of North Korea's official propaganda websites, Uriminzokkiri, over the weekend—is a low-budget visualization of what a city that looks like what a North Korean thinks New York City might look like burning in horror to the tune of "We Are the World."

As you can see it all begins with an odd dream sequence of a patriotic North Korean citizen that involves the rocket launch the country had in December. And yeah, that's "We Are the World" playing while all of this is happening. That sort of makes sense in that the video is imagining a unified Korea—such is the power of the rocket. Here's the sort of scary part. The rocket, which unified Korea, eventually evolves into this friendly-looking thing:

Except that thing is anything but friendly. That spaceship zooms over a United States which seems to be on fire, and this city, which we think is supposed to be New York, being attacked: 

According to Australia's AAP news agency, the captions read: "Somewhere in the United States, black clouds of smoke are billowing ... It seems that the nest of wickedness is ablaze." And here's one more shot of the imagined U.S. city being bombed. (Mind you, "We Are the World" has not stopped at this point.)

The video concludes with the dream being over, but an inspired young man believing this can surely happen. "Despite all kinds of attempts by imperialists to isolate and crush us ... never will anyone be able to stop the people marching toward a final victory," the video says.

So, North Korea really doesn't like the U.S. very much lately. Our first clue was that Barack Obama did not receive a New Year's card from Kim Jong-un, like the prime minister of Malta and president of Mongolia did. But also, the U.S. along with South Korea and Japan haven't been supportive of North Korea's nuclear ambitions of late. And North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency wrote today: 

The DPRK has drawn a final conclusion that it will have to take a measure stronger than a nuclear test to cope with the hostile forces' nuclear war moves that have become ever more undisguised. This is the demand of the people.

There is no other option for the DPRK but to fight it out.

Well, they have now exhausted the only other option of imagining the whole thing via low budget propaganda videos.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at aabadsantos at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.

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