Living History with Ambassador Joseph Yun

Foreign Affairs, Nuclear Weapons
Ambassador Yun
This Living History interview features Ambassador Joseph Yun, former U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Korea and Japan at the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Ambassador Yun recounts his diplomatic experience negotiating with the North Koreans and a series of efforts to maintain a direct line of communication with his counterparts. He also discusses his role in bringing back a detained U.S. citizen, Otto Warmbier, from North Korea.

Recovery Operations

Commentary
Dr. Jennie Jin, an anthropologist with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and the lead researcher tasked to identify the recent American POW/MIA remains from North Korea, joins resident expert Victor Cha and host H. Andrew Schwartz by phone from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Left Out

Commentary
Motoko Rich, the Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times, joins CSIS's Victor Cha by phone to discuss the view from Japan... Motoko Rich, the Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times, joins CSIS's Victor Cha by phone to discuss the view from Japan. Download transcript...

Grinding It Out

Commentary
Jonathan Cheng, the Seoul bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, joins resident experts Victor Cha and Sue Mi Terry by phone to discuss the specter of North Korea’s latest dismantling efforts, road blocks in the denuclearization talks, and the return of Korean War POW/MIA remains.

Yongbyon Declassified Part II: Progress on Building IRT-2000 Reactor

Nuclear Weapons, Yongbyon
North Korea’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons program is nearly six decades old. While archival documents have previously provided some evidence of North Korea’s intent to build weapons of mass destruction at an early stage in the Cold War, newly declassified satellite imagery from the Central Intelligence Agency gives us a more precise picture of how and exactly when North Korea started developing the fundamental components of its nuclear weapons program.

Third Visit

Commentary
Resident North Korea experts Victor Cha and Sue Mi Terry discuss Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s latest visit to North Korea. They also weigh in on the possibility of Kim Jong Un’s appearance at the 2018 United Nation General Assembly meeting in September.

Verification

Commentary
Rebecca Hersman, the director of the Project on Nuclear issues at CSIS who is a former WMD non-proliferation expert with the Defense Department, discusses the challenges and mechanics of complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization in North Korea.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Commentary
Special guests Ambassador Robert King, the former special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, and Joseph Kim, a young man who defected from North Korea in 2006, discuss human rights in North Korea and the Trump administration’s position on the issue in the aftermath of the Singapore Summit.

Stunning Our Allies

Commentary
Victor Cha, the former deputy head of the U.S. delegation to the Six-Party talks during the George W. Bush administration, and Mike Green, the senior director for Asia of the National Security Council of George W. Bush., talk about the outcome of the Singapore Summit. Mike joins us in the studio and Victor by phone in New York.

Trailer: The Impossible State

Commentary
North Korea is the impossible state. For over 45 years no American president has figured it out. Now, the stakes may be higher than ever as Donald Trump and the Trump administration come to the negotiating table. Each week join the people who know the most about North Korea—The Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Victor Cha, Mike Green, and Sue Mi Terry—for an insider’s discussion with host H. Andrew Schwartz about the United States’ top national security priority.