News Update: Mark Bowden on North Korea

Given new revelations about North Korea's nuclear capabilities—and newly harsh rhetoric from President Trump—Jeffrey Goldberg and Matt Thompson talk with Mark Bowden, author of The Atlantic's July/August cover story on how to deal with North Korea. In that story, Bowden laid out the four options a U.S. administration has for handling North Korea's nuclear ambitions—trying to prevent its progress, turning the screws on the country's leadership, decapitating its leaders, and accepting that a nuclear North Korea is inevitable—and why all of those options are bad. In this conversation, he talks about how this week's news affects that calculus, and whether any one of those paths has grown more likely.

This is a bonus episode. In our August 11 episode, our co-host Alex Wagner will rejoin us, and our guest will be Kurt Anderson, the author of our September cover story.

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