May 30, 2017
Joshua Pollack
This article was originally published on Arms Control Wonk on May 22, 2017.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are the topic du jour in the WMD world, but if you’re trying to get smart about the subject, where should you turn? The amount of material never gets any smaller, and you’ve nearly got to be an expert in your own right to judge what’s what.
I won’t try to catalogue and evaluate everything out there. Instead, I’d like to point out a handful of good things, say why I think they’re good, and note any concerns or qualifications. My emphasis will be both on recent, up-to-date publications and on older materials of enduring value. I’m also sticking with what’s openly accessible online, in English. A survey of the published literature is out of scope for today, and I’m not qualified to sift works in Korean, Japanese, etc. The focus, furthermore, will be on Weapons of Mass Destruction, with one partial exception: materials concerning how the regime functions and sees the world. That tells us, among other things, why WMD are so important to Pyongyang.
