Fallout

The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea

By: Joel S. Wit

Narrated by: Christopher Douyard

For almost four decades, the United States has tried to stop North Korea's attempts to build nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. Joel S. Wit, a former State Department official, takes listeners to the front lines of nuclear negotiations and to fierce policy debates and secret diplomatic gambits, recounting how perilously close the United States and North Korea have come, on various occasions, to nuclear confrontation. Based on more than three hundred interviews with officials in Washington, Beijing, and Seoul, as well as with the author's contacts in Pyongyang, this book chronicles how six American presidents have approached the problem of North Korea.

Wit points to Barack Obama and Donald Trump as the two presidents most responsible for the failure to halt North Korea's march to build a nuclear arsenal, since it was under their successive tenures that Pyongyang acquired the ability to threaten every city in North America. Wit also offers an unparalleled portrait of Kim Jong Un that refutes his caricature as impulsive and illogical. Like his father and his grandfather, Kim is a ruthless despot but also a canny and informed negotiator determined to secure his dictatorship's future by exploring diplomacy or, failing that, by building a nuclear arsenal.

©2025 Joel S. Wit (P)2025 Tantor Media

Great history undermined by annoying mispronunciations

This is a phenomenal accounting of years of diplomatic history. One could quibble with some of the author’s analysis—both that explicitly stated and that implied by where he spends the most time—but as a pure history of multiple rounds of engagement, it is a great read.

I found myself frequently frustrated by the narration, however, which was riddled with mispronunciations. Most egregious of all was the narrator’s repeated use of “Cho-ay” to say Choe, the family name of Choe Son Hui. Choe—pronounced more like “Chay” in one syllable as *all* Korean names are—is such a critical figure in this story. Mispronouncing her name throughout was distracting and emblematic of other sloppiness in the production.