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Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis | 
| Author: Mike Chinoy
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $12.87
You Save: $15.08 (54%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 43689
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 0312371535
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.7305193
EAN: 9780312371531
ASIN: 0312371535
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Meltdown is the riveting inside account of an American diplomatic disaster
When George W. Bush took office in 2001, North Korea’s nuclear program was frozen. Kim Jong-Il had signaled to the outgoing Clinton administration he was ready to negotiate an end to his missile program. Today, North Korea has become a full-fledged nuclear power, with enough fissile material to stage an underground test in 2006, manufacture as many as ten more warheads, and—in the worst-case scenario—provide nuclear material to rogue states or terrorist groups. How did the United States fail to prevent a long-standing adversary like North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons?
Drawing on more than two hundred interviews with key players in Washington, Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing, including Colin Powell, John Bolton, and ex-Korean president Kim Dae-jung, as well as insights gained during fourteen trips to Pyongyang, longtime CNN correspondent and North Korea expert Mike Chinoy provides a blow-by-blow account that takes readers behind the scenes of secret diplomatic meetings, disputed intelligence reports, and Washington turf battles as well as inside the mysterious world of North Korea. Meltdown shows how the U.S. refusal to engage in serious diplomacy spurred Kim Jong Il to stage his nuclear breakout, and provides a wealth of new material about the subsequent reversal of course that led the Bush administration to abandon confrontation in the hope of negotiating an end to the nuclear crisis.
Chinoy has produced a gripping account of one of America's longest-running, most volatile foreign policy crises that explains why North Korea remains a danger today—and why it didn't have to be this way.
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Best Book on North Korea Policy To Date August 10, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
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.
 Apologism for North Korea August 9, 2008
5 out of 13 found this review helpful
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.
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