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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 Vietnam's 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 Korea's 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 North Korea.

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).