Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World
by Gordon G. Chang
Random House, $217
Trying to make sense of international efforts to disarm North Korea of its ambitions to own nuclear weapons is like trying to follow three-dimensional chess.
Ostensibly, all six countries involved in the talks favour a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. That includes North Korea, which - in theory, at least - is willing to trade its purported nuclear weapons for aid, recognition and light-water reactors. Everyone, it would seem, is singing from the same sheet. In reality, all the participants have conflicting agendas.
China wants to appear to be the good world citizen by hosting the negotiations and to gather any favours that might come its way. But Beijing has relatively little interest in nuclear proliferation. Indeed, it has been a proliferator itself. The Chinese simply don't believe North Korea would be stupid enough to drop a bomb on them.