Ultimately, war is politics by other means, and international law is the codification of the practices and legal doctrines of great powers that define the limits on the use of “other means” by states pursuing political ends in endless, ruthless competition. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the Korean Peninsula, where a war suspended by the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement has never formally ended, and where the forces and treaty commitments of four nuclear-armed states — the United States, China, Russia and North Korea — converge. “Other means” in today’s world refers above all to nuclear weapons, the ultimate form of coercive force due to the absolute, annihilative ability they confer on a possessor to project an existential threat against an adversary. In Korea, the adversaries now describe their deterrence in precisely these terms. North Korea’s 2022 law on its nuclear forces policy declares that their mission is to make hostile forces understand that military confrontation with the North “brings about ruin.” The United States’ 2022 Nuclear Posture Review