Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (Hardcover)

by Mike Chinoy (Author)
Key Phrases: nium program, uranium effort, tailored containment, North Korea, United States, South Korean (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The Bush administration's bellicose but feckless attempts to quash North Korea's nuclear weapons program were the nadir of its famously maladroit diplomacy, to judge by this revealing blow-by-blow. Ex-CNN Pyongyang correspondent Chinoy details the rancorous infighting during which hardliners like John Bolton and Dick Cheney talked down State Department doves to impose an intransigent North Korea policy, replacing negotiations with Axis-of-Evil rhetoric and unilateral demands. Their approach backfired disastrously, he argues, as Pyongyang restarted and escalated its dormant nuclear initiative and finally tested an atom bomb while the U.S. fulminated helplessly—a needless outcome, he suggests, given the North Koreans' oft-expressed readiness to abandon their nuclear program in exchange for aid and normalized relations. Chinoy presents a lucid exposition of the issues along with a colorful account of diplomatic wrangling in which U.S. officials rivaled their North Korean counterparts in dogmatism and prickly sensitivity to niceties. (One joint statement was almost derailed when the Americans insisted on changing the phrase peaceful coexistence to exist peacefully together.) His is a fine, insightful diplomatic history of a dire confrontation—and a hard-hitting critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Photos. (Aug. 7)
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From Booklist
North Korea exploded an atomic bomb in October 2006, representing the failure of American diplomacy to thwart the country’s nuclear ambition. Chronicled here by former CNN reporter Chinoy, that diplomacy came in two flavors: negotiations favored by the Clinton administration, and a more confrontational approach preferred by the successor Bush administration. That neither succeeded probably says more about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a despotic Stalinist relic, than it does about the merits of carrots versus sticks, but that debate dominates Chinoy’s narrative. Clearly critical of sticks, Chinoy plainly gained greater access to advocates of negotiation than to its skeptics, and none to relevant North Korean officials. But the latter appear at one remove in the impressions of Americans who bargained with them, rendering a picture of North Korea’s truculent belligerence on the nuclear issue. Depicting, too, the politics within the D.C. foreign policy bureaucracy, Chinoy extensively quotes major players’ viewpoints, pegging their strategies and tactics to milestones on the path to the present impasse. A lively journalistic review of the past decade in U.S.–North Korean relations. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (August 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312371535
• ISBN-13: 978-0312371531
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #279,259 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Book on North Korea Policy To Date, August 10, 2008

By	JWN (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

In this excellent book, former CNN correspondent Mike Chinoy argues that the American failure to prevent North Korea from getting a nuclear bomb was the result of a combination of vicious, petty, and paralyzing bureaucratic warfare in Washington, an American unwillingness to negotiate, and North Korean brinkmanship.

Chinoy makes his case through a well-written, surprisingly exciting, and scrupulously fair account of the personalities, events, and decisions that made (and broke) Bush administration's often-confusing North Korea policies. The high quality of this reporting is clearly a reflection of the thoroughness and fairness of Chinoy's research: he seems to have interviewed just about everyone who is anyone in North Korea policy-making, from John Bolton to Colin Powell, and he gives all the sides their due.

Chinoy - who has been to North Korea something like 14 times, and reported on the North Korea issue for CNN for years - also offers some insights into why Pyongyang has often made seemingly irrational and dangerous decisions over the last eight or ten years. It's worth noting here that this is not the same thing as excusing or apologizing for North Korea's considerable duplicity and cruelty. Rather, Chinoy's examination of North Korean motives is a valuable and interesting contribution to our limited understanding of one of the most opaque countries in the world. To dismiss this as simply making excuses for North Korea's bad behavior is a gross and unfair oversimplification of a much more complex and sophisticated argument.

Bottom line: Meltdown is, without a doubt, the definitive account of the North Korean nuclear crisis. It is a brilliantly reported, exceptionally even-handed, and insightful book - and a must-read for anyone who wants to genuinely understand one of the most pressing and vital US foreign policy challenges today.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible Incompetence!, January 2, 2009

By	Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist" (Phoenix, AZ.) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"Meltdown" tells how the U.S.' refusal to engage in serious diplomacy spurred North Korea to stage its nuclear breakout testing missiles and a nuclear bomb, followed by de-escalation after six years of needless brinkmanship led by the Bush administration. En route, President Bush also managed to personally insult the heads of North and South (also a Nobel Peace Prize winner) Korea, as well as his own chief negotiator and Secretary of State, undercut the logic of U.S. actions vs. Iraq (by largely ignoring N.K.), again rely on dubious intelligence for major decision-making, and display a general lack of common sense (eg. risking progress on nuclear issues to pursue a questionable impoundment of $25 million of N.K. funds.

This same cowboy diplomacy pattern ("we don't negotiate - capitulate, then we'll talk" was was followed vs. Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Iran - where it also failed, with disastrous results.

In between, the reader is left wondering why Secretary of State Powell tolerated the treatment he and his department received (several of his underlings involved with N.K. resigned), amazed at the V.P. Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's close involvement in the N.K. issue - instead of avoiding Iraq War II and managing it better, perplexed by Secretary Rice's ineptness, and disappointed by the disjointed and childish decision-making (eg. screaming matches; "We won't talk to them because they're bad") at high levels of government.

North Korea doesn't come out blameless in Chinoy's account either, though at least there is rationale for its actions.

Bottom Line: "Meltdown" provides a credible and detailed accounting of how we almost incited Korean War II, possibly even WWIII. Administration actions in this instance parallel those taken vs. Russia, Iraq, and Palestine.

9 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Apologism for North Korea, August 9, 2008

By	maskirovka (Alexandria, Virginia) - See all my reviews

I bought a copy of this book because I study North Korea and there are lamentably few current books about the "Hermit Kingdom." But I felt dismayed just a few pages into it. Chinoy does not just bend over backwards to give the North Koreans every possible benefit of a doubt. No, he takes the art of logical contortions to new and symphonic heights to excuse and rationalize Pyongyang's behavior. Everything that North Korea does seems to have been provoked by the United States and whatever the sin may be it is somehow excusable. Here are some examples:

1. The North Korean HEU program (which Pyongyang ramped up in the late 1990s before Bush became president) was apparently the North Koreans' "reasonable" response to the "failures" by the United States to give North Korea it what it owed it under the Agreed Framework. Never mind the fact that the North Koreans kept that effort to develop an HEU program secret which sort of undermines the notion that they did it as a sort of protest against perceived unfair treatment by the US.

Also, Chinoy seems to think that the fact that the US has not named a specific site in North Korea as the location of the HEU program as somehow mitigating the fact that the North Koreans have one. Earth to Planet Chinoy! North Korea is full of huge underground facilities that could hide such a facility. Without access to the country, is Chinoy really surprised that the US can't seem to find the facility?

2. Another dreary old chestnut is that the Bush Administration "provoked" North Korea with the "axis of evil" statement and some of the other things that Bush has said about Kim Jong-Il. Granted, calling the man a "pygmy" is not helpful. But people need to read what the North Koreans call the United States. It make the occasional US outbursts pale in comparison.

3. The third thing that is the rankest sort of apologetics for Pyongyang is Chinoy's excuse for the North Koreans' sale of a nuclear reactor to Syria. Somehow, Chinoy believes that this was in response to the fact that tensions between the US and North Korea were high in 2003...Never mind the fact that the intelligence briefing that he cites (which people can listen to for themselves on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's website) states that the deal over the reactor stretched back to the mid to late 1990s.

Equally incredible is the fact that Chinoy takes comfort in the fact that the intelligence briefing on the reactor didn't explain where the Syrians would get the uranium to fuel the reactor. Once again, Earth to Planet Chinoy! They would get it from the North Koreans!

It's just unbelievable that someone who is supposed to be an expert on North Korea retails something like this book as the true facts about North Korea. Chinoy wouldn't know what the true facts about North Korea if they walked up to him and punched him in the face.