be considerate of whom he speaks to when making a speech in front of the world.” Consistent with the invective that he has directed against older North Korean officials, including his uncle Jang, Kim attacked Trump’s age and intellect, calling him—as the regime media translated into English—“mentally deranged” and a “dotard,” sending the world scrambling for the dictionary to find out that dotard is a synonym for an old, senile person. Trump’s senility, weakness, and “hard of hearing” made him “unfit to hold the prerogative of supreme command of a country, and he is surely a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire, rather than a politician.” Trump’s threats of a military confrontation “have convinced me, rather than frightening or stopping me,” Kim continued, “that the path I chose is correct and that it is the one I have to follow to the last.” Trump didn’t scare him because he was the one who was scared: “A frightened dog barks louder.”
Kim reiterated his ownership of the nuclear weapons program four months later in his televised New Year’s address in January 2018. Walking up to a massive podium, wearing a gray Western-style suit and his horn-rimmed glasses, he announced, “In no way would the United States dare to ignite a war against me and our country.” The United States should know that “the whole of its mainland is within the range of our nuclear strike and the nuclear button is on my office desk all the time; the United States needs to be clearly aware that this is not merely a threat but a reality.” He said that North Korea was a responsible nuclear power—for years another oft-repeated refrain from the Kim regime—and that he would not attack unless “hostile forces of aggression” infringed upon his country’s sovereignty. But then he went on to promise that he would “mass-produce nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles.” Once again, Kim’s rhetoric emphasized that it was he alone who controlled the nuclear weapons, boasting about what North Korea had been able to achieve since he came to power. And once again, he was driving home the point to domestic audiences that only he could protect North Koreans from the United States.
Not one to sit around and let an opportunity to respond go by in the face of such a personal challenge to his manhood and leadership, Trump tweeted that same day, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
The trading of barbs between Kim and Trump, attacking the size of each other’s “nuclear button,” heightened tensions and sent ripples of dread throughout the world. Senior U.S. officials had been echoing the president’s threats, fueling fears that Trump was not acting on his own, but that there were credible plans afoot to use military strikes against North Korea. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council in late November 2017, after the North’s ICBM test, “We are once again at a time of reckoning.” Kim “made a choice…that brings the world closer to war, not farther from it.” She said the United States did not seek war with North Korea, but “if war comes, make no mistake, the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed.” McMaster said in early December at an event in Washington that the North Korean threat is “increasing every day” and “there’s not much time left.”
Time seemed to be running out. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced in January that “it is now two minutes to midnight,” the closest the world has been to midnight since 1953 at the height of the Cold War. In its statement about the Doomsday Clock, a symbol of concerns among scientists about the potential for nuclear annihilation, the Bulletin explained that its reason for moving the clock closer to midnight was the “hyperbolic rhetoric and provocative actions” by North Korea and the United States that “have increased the possibility of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation.”
Fear dominated the news cycle at the end of 2017. Credible media reports from late December indicated that the Trump administration had “dramatically” increased preparations for a military strike—a “bloody nose”—to show Kim that America was serious about its commitment