Siegfried S. Hecker, An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program

Feb 09, 6:00 PM MST
Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo St, Santa Fe

Click here to view a YouTube recording of this event.

This event was co-sponsored by Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse and Global Santa Fe. Siegfried Hecker was interviewed by Global Santa Fe’s Program Chair, Jim Falk

Purchase Hinge Points online here or call the store to order.

Hinge Points brings readers literally inside the North Korean nuclear program, joining Siegfried Hecker to see what he saw and hear what he heard in his visits to North Korea from 2004 to 2010. Hecker goes beyond the technical details―described in plain English from his on-the-ground experience at the North’s nuclear center at Yongbyon―to put the nuclear program exactly where it belongs, in the context of decades of fateful foreign policy decisions in Pyongyang and Washington.

Describing these decisions as “hinge points,” he traces the consequences of opportunities missed by both sides.The result has been that successive U.S. administrations have been unable to prevent the North, with the weakest of hands, from becoming one of only three countries in the world that might target the United States with nuclear weapons. Hecker’s unique ability to marry the technical with the diplomatic is well informed by his interactions with North Korean and U.S. officials over many years, while his years of working with Russian, Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani nuclear officials have given him an unmatched breadth of experience from which to view and interpret the thinking and perspective of the North Koreans.

Siegfried Hecker was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 34 years, including 12 years as director. He was at Stanford University for 17 years, including 6 years as co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is now part-time professor of practice at Texas A&M University and at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Hecker has worked on nuclear matters for most of his career, including having visited all countries with declared nuclear weapons programs, including North Korea.