Machiavelli in the Ivory Tower Ep09: North Korea and the Bomb - A Conversation with Ankit Panda

In this episode of Machiavelli in the Ivory Tower, hosts Sarah and Hanna speak with Ankit Panda, who is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. They begin their wide-ranging discussion with a review of Ankit's 2020 book "Kim Jong Un and the Bomb: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea". Sarah, Hanna, and Ankit then engage in an exchange on current developments on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea's cooperation with Russia, and the need to treat North Korea as a problem of nuclear risk reduction, among other issues. They end by discussing the challenges of studying North Korean nuclear weapons issues and how academia and policy-makers can most fruitfully interact.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:09 Kim Jong Un and the Bomb: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea
04:21 Worrisome developments on the Korean Peninsula in early 2024
07:33 The future of North Korea-Russia cooperation
11:43 North Korea and the question of nuclear testing
16:20 North Korea and nuclear risk reduction (I)
21:13 North Korea and nuclear risk reduction (II)
25:54 Implications for nuclear threshold countries
31:40 How to study North Korea
36:22 What academics and policymakers can learn from each other