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 readers 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.