Will North Korea Ever Abolish Its Nuclear Weapons?
North Korea’s nuclear program goes beyond deterrence—it's a strategic tool shaping its global standing and domestic legitimacy. Pyongyang’s ambitions reflect a complex mix of survival, power, and ideology, revealing the deeper forces driving one of the world’s most secretive regimes.
The primary rationale for the development, maintenance, and stockpiling of nuclear weapons is to establish military superiority over conventional firepower of the enemy, ensuring prolonged survival against its potential hostilities. Central to this justification is the concept of deterrence, aimed at dissuading adversaries from initiating any attacks in the first place. However, recent technical breakthroughs, notably in computers, have raised doubts about the effectiveness of the previously thought-to-be invulnerable systems. As traditional deterrence mechanisms become increasingly obsolete, the costs and benefits of continued stockpiling of nuclear warheads by nuclear states, such as North Korea, may be called into question. Nonetheless, as the case of North Korea demonstrates in this paper, for some regimes there may exist additional, no less compelling reasons for developing and preserving nuclear arsenals.