HINGE POINTS

The former head of Los Alamos National Laboratory, who visited North Korean nuclear sites over seven consecutive years, reflects on the series of missed opportunities by U.S. policymakers to thwart the nation’s nuclear buildup.

How did North Korea go from “zero nuclear weapons in 2001 to an arsenal” of nearly 50 just 20 years later? Hecker’s first invitation to observe the country’s budding nuclear program came in 2004, after the Clinton-era Agreed Framework deal, which halted nuclear proliferation, had broken down under the hawkish George W. Bush administration. This, the author laments, was one of America’s greatest foreign policy errors, because the Agreed Framework allowed North Korea to ply the diplomacy track rather than the nuclear. With neoconservative hard-liners like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld constantly questioning North Korea’s sincerity, tensions ratcheted up between the countries and the diplomatic door closed. As a scientist, Hecker, now at Stanford, observed how North Korea had indeed shut down the main Yongbyon reactor until renewed enmity prompted a restart and acceleration of the nuclear weapons program, proudly vaunted by North Korean officials. Above all, Pyongyang sought normalization of relations and the lifting of sanctions for their economy. However, when it was discovered that North Korea abetted the creation of a reactor in Syria (subsequently bombed by Israel), U.S. officials balked. Later, Donald Trump’s much-hyped summit in Singapore, ostensibly focused on the “denuclearization” of the entire Korean Peninsula, was not backed by any real substance. Furthermore, despite the subsequent “love letters” between Trump and Kim Jong Un, national security adviser John Bolton effectively stymied any accord before the Hanoi summit in 2019—another lost diplomatic opportunity, writes Hecker. Though the text may be overly technical for general readers, it’s a valuable look at a shadowy regime.

An informed scientist effectively argues for diplomacy in nuclear armament talks with North Korea.