On November 20 at 6 pm, the Pacific Council will host Joel S. Wit, a former State Department official, for a conversation on his newest book release, Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea. 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. Wit, a former State Department official, takes readers to the front lines of nuclear negotiations and to fierce policy debates and secret diplomatic gambits, recounting how perilously close the United States and North Korea have come, on various occasions, to nuclear confrontation. 

Based on more than three hundred interviews with officials in Washington, Beijing, and Seoul, as well as with the author’s contacts in Pyongyang, this book chronicles how six American presidents have approached the problem of North Korea. Wit points to Barack Obama and Donald Trump as the two presidents most responsible for the failure to halt North Korea’s march to build a nuclear arsenal, since it was under their successive tenures that Pyongyang acquired the ability to threaten every city in North America. 

Wit also offers an unparalleled portrait of Kim Jong Un that refutes his caricature as impulsive and illogical. Like his father and his grandfather, Kim is a ruthless despot but also a canny and informed negotiator determined to secure his dictatorship’s future by exploring diplomacy or, failing that, by building a nuclear arsenal.

Guest Speaker

Joel S. Wit is a Distinguished Fellow in Asian and Security Studies at the Stimson Center.  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, over the next 15 years. Wit served as a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies US-Korea Institute from 2007-2018, a Senior Fellow at CSIS from 2002-2006 and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution from 1998-2001. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Fallout: The Inside Story of How America Failed to Disarm North Korea,” to be published by Yale University Press in October 2025.