The bombastic and exuberant Ri Chun-hee took to the television screens of North Koreans up and down the country on 3 September 2017. Dressed in a pink hanbok and wearing the obligatory badge with portraits depicting Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, North Korea's most famous TV presenter had an announcement to make. It was to be a major announcement, for Ri, now in her seventies, was semi-retired and only appeared on the screen of her fellow North Koreans when there was big news to announce. And the news certainly merited Ri's presence: earlier that day, Pyongyang had conducted a hydrogen bomb test. This was North Korea's sixth nuclear test, with a blast between 70 and 280 kilotons. That is, at least three times bigger than the previous test and a whopping 100 times more powerful than North Korea's first nuclear test, conducted on 9 October 2006. Unsurprisingly, Ri was using the Kim family's propaganda platform to hail “a very meaningful step in completing the national nuclear weapons programme” (BBC 2017).

Leaders from across the world reacted to North Korea's sixth nuclear test as they had done with the previous five. As a case in point, US President Donald Trump tweeted “North Korea has conducted a major nuclear test. Their words and actions continue to be very hostile and dangerous to the United Nations” (Balluck 2017). Although using a different, undiplomatic medium to comment on the test compared to previous American presidents, Trump did not deviate from his predecessors when it came to substance. Shortly after the test, the UN Security Council slapped a new round of sanctions on North Korea. With little to show after more than a decade of incremental sanctions on the North Korean regime and economy, sanctions had nonetheless become the default option for the international community to show its opposition to Pyongyang's nuclear programme. At the same time, some voices called for the resumption of dialogue with the Kim regime to try to move North Korea in the direction of denuclearization. By September 2017, those arguing that only more sanctions or, conversely, more dialogue would put an end to North Korea's nuclear programme were firmly convinced that theirs was the best means to denuclearize the country.