ABSTRACT
Even before United States of America (US) President Barack Obama declared in favor of nuclear abolition, other policy elites, military experts, leading academics, and media pundits, among others, were advocating for a nuclear-free world. Nuclear disarmament sounds more practical, although daunting in its own right, than nuclear abolition. The fears of nuclear terrorism were realistic, and all the more threatening because nuclear terrorism reboots the politics of nuclear war and deterrence. Deterrence had grown up in the context of the Cold War and nuclear weapons, especially focused on the bipolar competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Deterrence after the Cold War and in the present century is therefore not complicated compared to its mythical Cold War simplicity. The idea that nuclear weapons can be the causes of war is not mistaken in its entirety. North Korea's own nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs are additional reasons for US and other suspicions about its intentions.
