TIME Magazine Cites Poneman on North Korea

Centrus President and CEO Daniel Poneman’s expertise on North Korea was featured in a recent TIME Magazine article about the rogue nation’s nuclear ambitions.

Perhaps the right nudging could prompt the North Koreans to rethink their nuclear obsession. “They prize nothing more highly than regime survival. And they have come to associate their continued possession of nuclear weapons as supporting regime survival,” says Dan Poneman, an arms-control expert who has worked in the Administrations of three of the past four Presidents. “The job for the rest of the international community is to break that logic.”

Poneman was the National Security Council’s Director of Defense Policy and Arms Control under President George H.W. Bush from 1990 to 1992, when the U.S. government first held bilateral talks with North Korea about their nuclear program. From 1993 until 1996, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Nonproliferation and Export Controls at the NSC, and was involved in the negotiations that resolved the first North Korean nuclear crisis back in 1994. He coauthored Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis, which won the 2005 Dillon Award for Distinguished Writing on American Diplomacy.