The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

Soon after the nuclear explosion, Bush got serious about arms control talks with Pyongyang, largely at the urging of Condoleezza Rice, who was now his secretary of state. In the past, Cheney and Rumsfeld would have joined forces to quash such a move, but around this time Bush forced Rumsfeld to resign—for many reasons, most of them having to do with his failed policy in Iraq, which was now consumed by a sectarian civil war and an anti-American insurgency. As a result, Cheney found himself increasingly isolated. In early 2007, Bush let an assistant secretary of state, Christopher Hill, hold bilateral talks with North Korea in Berlin—the sort of talks that he had prohibited back when Kim Jong-il was merely threatening to detonate an atom bomb. Hill and his counterpart even signed a disarmament accord, but it was shot through with so many loopholes as to be meaningless. The restraints that Bill Clinton had imposed with the Agreed Framework, and had come close to nailing down in the talks on a missile ban, snapped off and blew away, perhaps forever. For the first time in nearly forty years, nuclear proliferation was a front-burner threat.