Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program

Abstract: Prof. Hecker will discuss his new book, Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program, in which he describes how this country—one of the most isolated in the world and in the policy cross hairs of every U.S. administration during the past 30 years—progressed from zero nuclear weapons in 2001 to a threatening arsenal of likely more than 50 such weapons today. Prof. Hecker will trace how opportunities were missed by both sides at key decision points—what he calls "hinge points." At CGSR, he will focus on how the lack of technically informed risk management decisions resulted in successive U.S. administrations being unable to prevent the North, with the weakest of hands, from becoming one of only three countries in the world that threaten the United States with nuclear weapons.

Bio: Siegfried Hecker is professor of practice at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and professor of practice in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University. He was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 34 years, including serving as its fifth director from 1986 through 1997. He was at Stanford University for 17 years in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and in the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), including serving as co-director from 2007 to 2012. Hecker has worked on nuclear matters for most of his career, including having visited all countries with declared nuclear weapons programs, including North Korea. Hecker is the editor of Doomed to Cooperate (2016), two volumes documenting the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation and Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program (2023) written with Elliot Serbin.