North Korea remains a puzzle to Americans. How did this country—one of the most isolated in the world and in the policy cross hairs of every U.S. administration during the past 30 years—progress from zero nuclear weapons in 2001 to a threatening arsenal of perhaps 50 such weapons in 2021?Hinge Points brings readers literally inside the North Korean nuclear program, joining Siegfried Hecker to see what he saw and hear what he heard in his visits to North Korea from 2004 to ...

From a seasoned advisor, "a meaty, fast-paced portrait of North Korean society, economy, politics and foreign policy" ( Foreign Affairs).In The Impossible State, international-policy expert and former Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council Victor Cha pulls back the curtain on this controversial and isolated country, providing the best look yet at North Korea's history, the rise of the Kim family dynasty, and the obsessive pers...

The culminating volume in Richard Rhodes’s monumental and prizewinning history of nuclear weapons, offering the first comprehensive narrative of the challenges faced in a post–Cold War age.The past twenty years have transformed our relationship with nuclear weapons drastically. With extraordinary depth of knowledge and understanding, Rhodes makes clear how the five original nuclear powers—Russia, Great Britain, France, China, and especially the United States—have struggled with new...

Depicted as an insular and forbidding police state with an "insane" dictator at its helm, North Korea—charter member of Bush's "Axis of Evil"—is a country the U.S. loves to hate. Now the CIA says it possesses nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as long-range missiles capable of delivering them to America's West Coast.But, as Bruce Cumings demonstrates in this provocative, lively read, the story of the U.S.-Korea conflict is more complex than our leaders or our news m...

An acclaimed history of the Korean Peninsula from World War II to the present dayNorth Korea is an impoverished, famine-ridden nation, but it is also a nuclear power whose dictator Kim Jong-un regularly threatens his neighbors and adversaries, the United States in particular, with destruction. Even though Kim and President Donald Trump's responses to him dominate the daily headlines, the idea that North Korea is a menace is not a new one. Indeed, ever since Korea w...

When George W. Bush took office in 2001, North Korea's nuclear program was frozen and Kim Jong Il had signaled he was ready to negotiate. Today, North Korea possesses as many as ten nuclear warheads, and possibly the means to provide nuclear material to rogue states or terrorist groups. How did this happen?Drawing on more than two hundred interviews with key players in Washington, Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing, including Colin Powell, John Bolton, and ex–Korean president Kim Dae-jung, a...

"A welcome antidote to the strange confluence of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) opponents" by one of America's best known weapons experts (Christopher F. Chyba, Science).With clarity and expertise, Joseph Cirincione presents an even-handed look at the history of nuclear proliferation and an optimistic vision of its future, providing a comprehensive survey of the wide range of critical perspectives.Cirincione begins with the first atomic disc...

President Trump threatens North Korea with 'fire and fury like the world has never seen', whilst fellow Republican John McCain warns that the country risks 'extinction'. But what does the regime in North Korea actually want? Is Kim Jong-un truly the mad cartoon villain that the media love to portray? Without being an apologist for the oppressive North Korean government, T. J. Coles exposes the propaganda war waged against it, revealing the truth behind the simplistic news headlines. North ...

My Journey at the Nuclear Brink is a continuation of William J. Perry's efforts to keep the world safe from a nuclear catastrophe. It tells the story of his coming of age in the nuclear era, his role in trying to shape and contain it, and how his thinking has changed about the threat these weapons pose.In a remarkable career, Perry has dealt firsthand with the changing nuclear threat. Decades of experience and special access to top-secret knowledge of strategic nuclear opt...

North Korea is a country of paradoxes and contradictions. Although it remains an economic basket case that cannot feed and clothe its own people, it nevertheless possesses one of the world's largest armed forces. Whether measured in terms of the total number of personnel in uniform, numbers of special operations soldiers, the size of its submarine fleet, quantity of ballistic missiles in its arsenal, or its substantial weapons of mass destruction programs, Pyongyang is a major military pow...

‘The young dictator comes under close scrutiny in this intelligent account’ Sunday TimesWhen Kim Jong Un became the leader of North Korea in 2011, many expected his rule to be short. Years later, he remains the unchallenged dictator of a nuclear rogue state with weaponry capable of threatening the West.In this behind-the-scenes look, former CIA analyst and North Korea expert Jung H. Pak reveals the explosive story of Kim Jong II’s third son: the sp...

Atomic Steppe tells the untold true story of how the obscure country of Kazakhstan said no to the most powerful weapons in human history. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the marginalized Central Asian republic suddenly found itself with the world's fourth largest nuclear arsenal on its territory. Would it give up these fire-ready weapons—or try to become a Central Asian North Korea?This book takes us inside Kazakhstan's extraordinary and little-known nuclear history fro...