book description
 

The United States is the mightiest nation in history.  Yet for six decades one of the world’s weakest states has challenged the superpower and kept it at bay.  Today, that country also threatens to change the course of human events with an act of unimaginable devastation and thereby take the best period in human history and turn it into the worst. Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World analyzes the failed society that has become the gravest threat to America and international order: North Korea.  Nuclear Showdown puts that country into the context of the future of the United States, the global spread of nuclear weapons, and the crises threatening to turn Asia into the world’s next battleground.

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A most thoughtful and challenging book.  Chang goes far beyond his immediate subject of North Korea to examine, with unflinching logic, the future of the whole nonproliferation regime, and argues that the stakes in Korea are no less than whether the world is to face a new and many-sided nuclear arms race that we may not survive.

Arthur Waldron, Lauder Professor of International Relations, University of Pennsylvania

 

Nuclear Showdown is the most readable and complete case for regime change in North Korea there is.

Henry D. Sokolski, executive director, The Nonproliferation Policy Education Center

 

A page-turner, Nuclear Showdown is not only a superb (and frightening) history of the U.S.-North Korea nuclear confrontation but also provides important insights into the larger U.S.-China relationship, which forms the crucial context for that confrontation—a context Gordon Chang knows so well from his many years in Asia, as well as from his extensive investigation of documents relating to this crisis.

Walter LaFeber, Andrew  H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor, Cornell University

© 2006 Gordon G. Chang