Meltdown

“Mr. Chinoy is a good reporter and a fluid writer . . . Meltdown is a comprehensive and readable account of the administration’s deliberations on North Korea. He’s especially good at re-creating the internal battles between those led by Colin Powell and later Condoleezza Rice who believed that North Korea was ready to negotiate in good faith and those—Dick Cheney John Bolton, Robert Joseph—who looked at Pyongyang’s past and continuing deceptions and were profoundly skeptical that  it would abide by any new promises. He’s right that U.S. policy was paralyzed by the infighting, and he’s right, too, to blame the president for not setting a clearer course.”—Melanie Kirkpatrick, The Wall Street Journal

“Students of American diplomatic history will find much grist for the mill here, particularly Mr. Chinoy’s portrait of the impotence of Colin Powell and ingenuity of Christopher Hill . . . There are also important revelations about controversial aspects of the North Korean issue . . . Meltdown adds to the growing literature on the dysfunctionality of the Bush administration.”—Far Eastern Economic Review

“Chinoy has produced what will undoubtedly be the definitive account.”—Foreign Affairs

“Mike Chinoy has written a riveting account of one of the most important diplomatic sagas of the Bush years.”—Mark Clifford, Time Asia

"A fascinating account of the North Korean nuclear crisis. Through on-the-ground reporting inside North Korea and meticulous research, Mike Chinoy takes us behind the headlines, offering a rare glimpse inside this secretive country and a better understanding of what really brought us to the brink with Kim Jong Il."—Anderson Cooper, CNN

“Meltdown is a superb fly-on-the-wall, blow-by-blow history of how and why the United States repeatedly failed in dealing with the ambitions of North Korean leader Kim Jong II—for whom ‘going nuclear was the best and perhaps the only way to ensure he wouldn’t share Saddam Hussein’s fate.’ The author, having managed in the manner of Bob Woodward to gain access to a long list c of intimately involved policymakers and negotiators, builds on his many years of journalistic coverage—including more than a dozen visits to Pyongyang—of one of the most challenging military-diplomatic problems of our time. While focusing on confrontations between neoconservative hardliners and pro-engagement ‘realists’ within the administration of President George W. Bush, Mike Chinoy lucidly lays out the whole sad story stretching back to Clinton administration days—and it’s all relevant to the political here and now. He gives us, for example, a richly detailed account of the farce that began with the 1998 press leak of a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency claim that spy satellites had discovered a new, underground nuclear site. Senator John McCain and others called for military action—before the Americans, having provided the North Korean regime 100,000 tons of potatoes in exchange for permission to send inspectors, arrived to find an empty cave with no sign of nuclear development. Meltdown is authoritative and comprehensive, utterly fascinating, and accessible to the general reader while offering even the most knowledgeable specialist new and important information. Mike Chinoy deserves applause for an impressive achievement.”—Bradley K. Martin, author of Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynast

“It's easy to demonize the North Koreans, not quite as easy to dismiss them; although the Bush administration has tried to do both. Mike Chinoy brilliantly and painstakingly reconstructs the faltering and dangerous dynamic by which Washington and Pyonyang misread one another's intentions. It's a path that could well lead to nuclear catastrophe and a story that's been told here with unblinking clarity.”—Ted Koppel

"Mike Chinoy offers fascinating and highly readable insights not only into the bureucratic battles in Washington, but also into the inner workings of our diplomacy with China, South Korea, and Japan, as well as the often inscrutable regime in Pyongyang."—Warren Christopher, former Secretary of State

“Mike Chinoy’s superbly written book tells the tragic story of how Washington’s unwillingness to engage in serious diplomacy with Pyongyang contributed to a new nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula, alienating our South Korean allies in the process.  He goes on to document the dramatic reversal of course that has seen the Bush administration drop its failed policy aimed at isolating and confronting North Korea, adopting instead a creative approach that, if North Korea acts wisely and rationally, could finally end the nuclear crisis, bring North Korea into the community of nations, and improve the lives of the North Korean people. This book, and the blunt, no-holds-barred comments it contains from many of the key protagonists of this period, is not to be missed.”—Evans Revere, president of The Korea Society

“The explosion of a nuclear warhead by North Korea in October 2006 was the single greatest failure in a decades-long effort to contain the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Mike Chinoy's Meltdown tells the tale of the tortured path that led to that failure, and the ongoing attempt to contain the fallout, with an authority and a wealth of insider detail that is unmatched. Meltdown is a diplomatic history that reads like a spy novel. It takes us inside the Washington wars that crippled the Bush administration's North Korea policy, and offers fresh insights into the view from Pyongyang, as well as from Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo. Meltdown will be the gold standard for reporting on the North Korean nuclear crisis for years to come.”—Daniel Sneider, Associate Director for Research, Shorenstein Asia–Pacific Research Center, Stanford University

“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.”—Publishers Weekly

“A knowledgeable chronicle of U.S.-North Korean negotiations during the Clinton and Bush White House years. Chinoy formerly covered North and South Korea for CNN and now studies them from afar as a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy. He shows that Kim Jong-Il is indeed a dictator who continues the repressive policies of his father. Unlike many other journalists and foreign-policy analysts, however, Chinoy analyzes U.S. and South Korean policymakers just as closely as the North Koreans, with China, Japan and other nations also figuring in the mix. This provides welcome context for North Korea's development of a nuclear arsenal. If Kim Jong-Il comes across as a villain driving an “Axis of Evil” nation, current President Bush is painted in colors just as dark. In scene after scene, meticulously sourced by Chinoy (though some of those sources insisted on and received anonymity), Bush and his chief foreign-policy advisors come across as ideologues at best, fools squandering an opportunity for nuclear disarmament at worst. The author does not appear to be a shrill, knee-jerk Bush administration critic, but a journalist taking the story where the facts have led him. The irony is that the Bush administration built its foreign policy around the desire to prevent countries like North Korea from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but failed in part because of its inability to negotiate effectively. Chinoy's depiction of the visceral, personal hostility Bush developed for Kim Jong-Il is especially disturbing, because he shows a U.S. president making decisions based on emotion instead of reason. The only caveat to make about this splendid book is that its detail is so immense, the back and forth of diplomacy that it describes so lacking in rationality, that the narrative occasionally becomes overwhelming. A triumph of explanatory reporting about foreign policy.”—Kirkus Reviews