There has been a lot of loose and scary talk about North Korea in the US media. The loose talk revolves around such terms as “nuclear threat”, “nuclear blackmail”, “appeasement”, and “illegality”. Use of these terms is loose because they do not accurately characterize what the North Koreans are doing, and it is pernicious because they frame North Korean issues in ways that make a diplomatic solution of them well-neigh impossible. Yet the use of these terms to characterize North Korea actions is rarely challenged in the mainstream media.