Hinge Points News Today

Washington underappreciates Beijing’s culpability in Pyongyang’s nuclear proliferation efforts at its own peril.

In 2019, then U.S. President Donald Trump received bipartisan support, despite coming home empty-handed on the heels of a failed summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Vietnams capital. The rationale of U.S. senators who backed Trump, regardless of their party affiliations, was that sometimes no deal is better than a bad deal to curb North Koreas nuclear ambitions. And this was also true at that time, because the U.S. would have made too many concessions otherwise to strike a deal with N...

CNS Distinguished Professor of Practice Dr. Siegfried Hecker gave a book talk on his newly released book, Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program.

In this interview with Bulletin editor John Mecklin, former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Siegfried Hecker explains how three successive US presidential administrations failed to take advantage of an apparent willingness by North Korea to accept a fundamentally new relationship with the United States—along with significant controls on its nuclear program.

An excerpt from the preface to "Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program," a book written by Siegfried S. Hecker with Elliot A. Serbin (Stanford University Press, January 2023).

Cipher Brief Senior National Security Columnist Walter Pincus: U.S. and South Korea are back to pre-Trump drawing table on North Korea

Home | Book | Trips |

Between 2004 and 2010, Dr. Siegfried Hecker, made seven trips to North Korea exploring ways to reduce the danger of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.

In his new book, Hinge Points, Siegfried Hecker reflects on the circumstances that led to his first trip to North Korea in 2004.

North Korea remains a puzzle to Americans. It is difficult for the general reader to assess the real danger North Korea and its current enigmatic leader, Kim Jong Un, pose. How did North Korea, one of the poorest and most isolated countries in the world in the crosshairs of every U.S. administration during the past 30 years, progress from no nuclear weapons in 2001 to a threatening arsenal of 30 to 50 weapons in 2021? Hinge Points posits that the conventional wisdom that Americas good faith dipl...