Hunting Nukes

For fifteen years, Richard Phillip Lawless served as a clandestine-services officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. His primary duty involved seeking out and exposing undeclared nuclear weapons activities within countries of the highest concern to the U.S. government. Hunting Nukes is his detailed chronicle of those experiences. Among them, Lawless reveals the successful takedown of the South Korean strategic weapons program in the mid-1970s. He describes, in detail, the Agency's operation that detected, penetrated, defined and eventually blocked that country's covert effort. Reentering U.S. Government service in the wake of 9/11, he joined the senior levels of policy-making at the Department of Defense. Lawless recounts his duties as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, particularly in the 2002-2008 talks with the rogue North Korean regime-the so-called "Six Party Talks." In those cases and others, Lawless details his role in the political and bureaucratic struggles necessary to keep the world's most terrifying weapons out of the hands of the world's least responsible and most dangerous regimes.