In DB2, how can I disable NLJOIN?
You might wish to check out this article on join methods and how DB2 chooses which one when.

Based on this documentation (which is for DB2 8 and I'm assuming it is similar for 9+, though not necessarily), nested loop joins are always available to the optimizer to use. DB2 can select merge sort and hash as the optimizer level is upped from 1 and other things are present (read the article to see which).