North Korea Hinge Points: Bad Decisions Led to Bad Consequences

Sig Hecker will present the main arguments and conclusions from his upcoming book with Elliot Serbin on North Korea's nuclear program. He will draw upon insights gained during his seven visits to North Korea between 2004 and 2010 to provide an assessment of the technical history and status of the North's nuclear weapon program.

Dr. Hecker believes that whereas the Kim dynasty was seriously interested in reaching normalized relations with the United States, it followed a dual-track nuclear plus diplomacy strategy. Washington's ineffective response to that strategy led to hinge points at which bad decisions led to bad consequences and missed opportunities. He is looking for critique, comments and suggestions as the book writing is reaching its final stage.

Siegfried S. Hecker is a professor emeritus (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Hecker was co-director of CISAC from 2007-2012. He served as the fifth director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986-1997, and received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in metallurgy from Case Western Reserve University. His current professional interests include nuclear weapons policy, plutonium research, global nuclear risk reduction with Russia, China, Pakistan, India, North Korea and Iran, the safety and security implications of the global expansion of nuclear energy, and threats of nuclear terrorism. In 2016, Dr. Hecker published two edited volumes of "Doomed to Cooperate" documenting the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory nuclear cooperation since 1992.