Is North Korea Preparing for War?

This event is available to in-person attendees and will not be livestreamed.

In this talk, Carlin and Hecker will discuss the answer to the question posed in their recent article Is Kim Jong Un Preparing for War? and share its background and the reactions to it.

About the Speakers:

Robert Carlin, a longtime analyst of North Korea and frequent visitor to the DPRK, is currently a non-resident scholar at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. From 2006-2022, he was a consultant at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Before that, he was a political advisor at the Korean Economic Development Organization (KEDO), a multinational consortium organized to carry out key provisions of the 1994 US-DPRK Agreed Framework. From 1989, Carlin was in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, concurrently taking part as an intelligence advisor in a range of negotiations with the DPRK. In various capacities, Carlin has visited North Korea over 30 times. He is the co-author with Don Oberdorfer of The Two Koreas, third edition, 2014. 

Siegfried Hecker is an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction, and nuclear security. He is currently a professor of practice at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University. Hecker served at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 34 years, including 12 years as director from 1986 through 1997. He was affiliated with Stanford University for 17 years, including 6 years as co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). At Stanford, he was a professor (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow at CISAC. Dr. Hecker is the editor of Doomed to Cooperate (2016), two volumes documenting the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation, and Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program (2023) written with Elliot Serbin.

All media representatives interested in covering the event or accessing the event site should contact aparc-communications@stanford.edu by 5 PM Pacific Time, Tuesday, March 5.

Directions and Parking > 

A related event by the speakers held at APARC in 2020 is available to view at https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/experts-korea-discuss-future-north-korea-amidst-escalations.