The military would just put one of their men in there directly. The Kims have leaned very heavily on the military as their support base (since theirs was not an organic "revolution" in the beginning, so they don't have the kind of grass-roots basis that Bolshevism had in the USSR or has in China. They were basically foreigners, hiding out in Manchuria and the Russian Maritime Provinces, Korean by ethnicity but not by birth, and armed and sent in by the Soviets after the Japanese retreat from Korea). Il-Sung and *especially* Jong Il gleaned their legitimacy (such as it was) from military support, and supposedly military veterans (especially survivors from the Korean War era) are the biggest supporters of the regime domestically.
If the Kim line died off and it didn't mean the end of the DPRK as a whole, it would be a Generalissimo of some sort who got the helm.
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
