Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea

by Joel S. Wit

A behind-the-scenes look into why U.S. efforts to contain North Korea’s nuclear capabilities have not worked
 
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. Joel S. 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.

Genres: History

548 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 28, 2025

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fallout is a detailed look at America’s efforts to negotiate with North Korea to eliminate its nuclear weapons. The author has an insider’s perspective as he personally participated in many of the talks over the past 30 years. Fallout covers the time period from the late Clinton administration all the way through the beginning of the second Trump administration. The book goes into great detail about how each subsequent administration tried and failed to stop North Korea’s nuclear expansion. The book is very well sourced and covers many of the behind-the-scenes engagements and negotiations with North Korea that took place out of the public’s eye. It’s sobering to read about the missed opportunities that we may have had as a country to establish better relations with North Korea and to realize that those failures have led us to a very dangerous situation in Asia.

If you’re a reader that is interested in America’s nuclear policy, especially as it relates to North Korea, you’ll find the book interesting and insightful. While the book is very detailed, I found all of the writing to be interesting and the content moved along quickly.

[Marko Beljac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exceptionally well researched, and providing some tidbits not previously known and I say the latter as someone that has followed this for quite awhile. That makes this a valuable and important addition to the literature. The framework of the book - tacitly accepted without further critical reflection - is Sigfried Hecker’s concept of “hinge points.” Hecker has a book by that title, which I read and reviewed. Quickly, hinge points is the thesis that at points of diplomatic failure with the US North Korea decided to forego nuclear disarmament. I’m not convinced. I’d argue - tentatively given we don’t know the full story - that North Korea’s nuclear weapons status was set in stone after the collapse of the Agreed Framework and the building of the Kangson uranium enrichment plant. The subsequent diplomacy was about not so much disarmament but what North Korea’s nuclear weapons posture would look like - would it be constrained through arms control or would it expand without constraint? This is a plausible hypothesis consistent with what we know, but it’s not even entertained by the author. This points to a weakness with the book - is this supposed to be an analytical work or is it trying to be something akin to a Bob Woodward style book? Furthermore, a second tacit assumption is also problematic. Has the US really tried to disarm North Korea or has it used concerns about nuclear proliferation to pursue a managed form of regime change? Finally, there can be no inside story regarding nuclear diplomacy with North Korea until we’re given the North Korean version - an inside story based on selective tidbits from US officials is not an inside story.