Chinoy’s view, nonetheless, is that North Korea is not to be mocked, let alone damned outright. Isolation is the beginning and end of its dilemma. Even Beijing, once its closest ally, apparently views it nowadays with distrust. Where else can it turn? So instead of seeking to please, it behaves like a hornet, more than ready to sting anyone who approaches with dubious intent, and determined to show that, despite its size, relative poverty and lack of international friends, it can return hostility with hostility any day of the week.
And so it was that this country became, on October 9, 2006, the world’s eighth declared nuclear power. The device tested was very small, 50 times smaller than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. Even so, its detonation represented, Chinoy insists, the “utter failure” of the Bush administration’s entire approach. Even China was “outraged.” It’s the purpose of Meltdown to demonstrate how such an extremely undesirable turn of events came about.
If you want insight, and from an Asian perspective, into how the Bush administration worked, this book will supply it. If you want to know how North Korea lives, from the Dear Leader’s rumored collection of 20,000 Hollywood movies to the orange-sized tumor on the right side of the late Great Leader’s neck (there’s even a photo of Chinoy offering him his business card), then again this book is the place to find it.
This is a tragic tale in Chinoy’s telling — how Washington turned its back on diplomacy, alienating its South Korean ally in the process, and in effect precipitated the nuclear crisis we now live with. Chinoy doesn’t anywhere spotlight the current US president, but there can be no doubt whatever at the delight he must feel in the change of the man at the helm.
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