For a moment, imagine the NK Leader eating with his generals. One of them drops dead. A few moments later, another one drops dead. Rinse and repeat over a week. Then, Kim Jong-un wakes from a bad night's sleep to this...
This is almost no different from the military head games Reagan ran around the Soviets in the early 1980s. It was brutally effective, without a shot being fired.
"Sometimes we would send bombers over the North Pole and their radars would click on," recalls Gen. Jack Chain, [a] former Strategic Air Command commander. "Other times fighter-bombers would probe their Asian or European periphery." During peak times, the operation would include several maneuvers in a week. They would come at irregular intervals to make the effect all the more unsettling. Then, as quickly as the unannounced flights began, they would stop, only to begin again a few weeks later.
Yea, if we go psyops, we will still get rhetoric from NK and his people remain under tyranny. However, he can take a hint, and I suspect news of how that new guy in DC operates will reach China pretty fast AND the KGB guys may think twice about their new job. Then...BOOM...NK is now neutralized.