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For almost four decades, the United States has tried to stop North Korea’s attempts to build nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. Based on more than 300 interviews with officials in Washington, Seoul and Beijing, as well as his own encounters with North Korean government officials over two decades, Joel Wit’s new book, Fallout: The Inside Story of America’s Failure to Disarm North Korea, tells the up until now untold story of how six American presidents failed to stop Pyongyang. He points to Barack Obama and Donald Trump as the two presidents most responsible for that failure. As a result, the United States is now faced with the threat of North Korea’s missiles that can threaten its cities and northeast Asia is on the verge of a nuclear arms race. Wit will also examine what if anything can be done to stop this dangerous situation from becoming even more dangerous, including the possibility of more Trump-Kim summits.
Joel S. Wit is a Distinguished Fellow at the Henry L. Stimson Center and former director of the 38North program. As a State Department official, he helped negotiate the 1994 U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework and was in charge of its implementation until he left government in 2002. He met regularly with senior North Korean government officials over the next 15 years. Wit served as a Senior Fellow at the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies from 2017-2018 and at the Henry L. Stimson Center until 2022. He is a co-author (with Robert Gallucci and Daniel Poneman) of Going Critical: The First North Korea Nuclear Crisis, published by the Brooking Institution Press.