How America Failed to Disarm North Korea: Implications for the Future
Featuring:
Joel Wit
Distinguished Fellow of Asian and Security Studies, Stimson Center
Moderated by:
Nick Schifrin
Foreign Affairs and Defense Correspondent, PBS NewsHour
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Largely based on almost 300 interviews with former US, South Korean and Chinese officials as well as his own experiences, Joel Wit’s new book, Fallout: The Inside Story of America’s Failure to Disarm North Korea, examines how six American presidents failed to stop Pyongyang from building nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. As a result, the United States is now faced with the threat that North Korean missiles could reach its cities, and northeast Asia is on the verge of a nuclear arms race.
To dive deeper, NCNK and cosponsors 38 North, the Institute for Science and International Security, and the Arms Control Association invite you to join us on October 28 for a one-on-one discussion with Joel Wit, Distinguished Fellow of Asian and Security Studies at the Stimson Center, and Nick Schifrin, Foreign Affairs and Defense Correspondent, PBS News Hour. This hybrid event will take place at the Stimson Center, 1211 Connecticut Avenue NW, 8th floor, from 10-11am, and be livestreamed via Zoom.
About the Speakers
Joel S. Wit is a Distinguished Fellow in Asian and Security Studies at the Stimson Center. Wit is an internationally recognized expert on Northeast Asia security issues and co-founder of the 38 North website. As a U.S. State Department official, he helped negotiate the 1994 US-DPRK Agreed Framework and was subsequently in charge of its implementation until he left government in 2002, holding countless talks with North Korean officials, including the military and nuclear establishments.
Nick Schifrin is PBS NewsHour’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Correspondent. He leads NewsHour’s daily foreign coverage, including multiple trips to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion, and has created weeklong series for the NewsHour from nearly a dozen countries. The PBS NewsHour series “Inside Putin’s Russia” won a 2017 Peabody Award and the National Press Club’s Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence. In 2020 Schifrin received the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Arthur Ross Media Award for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis of Foreign Affairs. He was a member of the NewsHour teams awarded a 2021 Peabody for coverage of COVID-19, and a 2023 duPont Columbia Award for coverage of Afghanistan and Ukraine.