When the Same North Korea Policy Fails Over and Over Again

Excerpt

When Siegfried Hecker visited North Korea in 2004, a senior North Korean nuclear scientist asked him, “Would you like to see our product?” Within minutes, Hecker, then a senior fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was holding North Korean plutonium, a building block for Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. In the just-released Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program, written with Elliot Serbin, Hecker provides an in-depth look at his visits to North Korea over seven consecutive years, from 2004 to 2010.

There is a vigorous debate among North Korea scholars on U.S. policy toward Pyongyang, but the consensus is that the policy has been a failure since 1994. Five presidents, Republican and Democratic, have failed to convince three generations of the Kim family that it is less secure with nuclear weapons. North Korea has pointed to Iraq and Libya—and the fates of their former leaders—as cautionary tales of what can happen to a nonnuclear country. In 1994, Ukraine famously gave up its Soviet-era nuclear warheads and strategic bombers to Russia in return for a security guarantee from Moscow, Washington, and London—and North Korea is noting how that ended. Hecker’s book, the newest entry into the North Korea discussion, is therefore an interesting and timely read for experts and nonexperts alike.