Joel S. Wit, "Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea" (Yale UP, 2025)

Dec 26, 2025

Joel S. Wit, distinguished fellow in Asian security studies and former U.S. State Department official, delivers insights from his book on America's failed North Korea disarmament efforts. He discusses the crises and negotiations that nearly spiraled into war and critiques the leadership of Obama and Trump during pivotal moments. Wit highlights the intelligence of North Korean negotiators and warns of rising tensions in Northeast Asia. He concludes with a grim assessment of the likelihood of denuclearization and the future risks involved.

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INSIGHT

Decades Of Failure Produced Today’s Threat

The U.S. failed to stop North Korea's nuclear program after decades of mixed diplomacy and crisis management.
Joel S. Wit warns the program now threatens American cities and reflects long-term policy shortcomings.

ANECDOTE

From Soviet Arms Control To North Korea

Wit describes stumbling into North Korea work after focusing on the Soviet Union and arms control at Columbia.
He then spent roughly 30 years in the State Department and related diplomacy on Korea.

INSIGHT

Agreed Framework Was Partial, Not Permanent

The 1994 Agreed Framework ended an immediate crisis but did not resolve decades of hostility.
It traded reactors and fuel for freeze/dismantlement steps plus a broader normalization track that stalled later.

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After nearly four decades of negotiations, sanctions, summits, threats, and backdoor channels, the United States has failed to stop North Korea's nuclear program which now has the capability to strike American cities with weapons of mass destruction. In Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea (Yale UP, 2025), Joel S. Wit explains why US efforts to contain North Korea have not worked and gives readers a front-row seat to the policy debates, diplomatic deals, and secret talks between Washington and Pyongyang.

Wit, a former State Department official, takes readers to the front lines of nuclear negotiations and recounts 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.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on his first book which examines the high price that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were willing to pay in order to achieve total victory in World War II. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via his website. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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