Security in northeast Asia: structuring a settlement

A potential pathway exists for a Northeast Asian settlement where the Koreas, the United States, China, and Japan can each live within the status quo. Sustaining a settlement will require reining in foreign policy hawks reluctant to allow the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to retain a nuclear arsenal. The United States will also need to engage allies fearful of conflict with North Korea but also disinclined to let a neighboring state enjoy a local nuclear monopoly. The United States should continue outreach to North Korea with the objective of establishing a process that links sanctions relief and security guarantees to a plan for eventual denuclearization. The future China-DPRK relationship must be considered and isolated from the US-China relationship— notably, economic tensions and disputes in the South and East China Seas. It should facilitate Chinese leverage over North Korea and encourage China to reinforce its economic and security ties with North Korea to influence and restrain Pyongyang’s decision making. The Trump administration must earn the support of stakeholders across the policy-making and procedural spectrum and facilitate a domestic political consensus in favor of the emerging settlement. Securing a settlement in Northeast Asia may be a productive way of reducing one of the most troublesome spots in US foreign relations.1Published versio

A Cryptographic Escrow for Treaty Declarations and Step-by-Step Verification

The verification of arms-control and disarmament agreements requires states to provide declarations, including information on sensitive military sites and assets. There are important cases, however, where negotiations of these agreements are impeded because states are reluctant to provide any such data, because of concerns about prematurely handing over militarily significant information. To address this challenge, we present a cryptographic escrow that allows a state to make a complete declaration of sites and assets at the outset and commit to its content, but only reveal the sensitive information therein sequentially. Combined with an inspection regime, our escrow allows for step-by-step verification of the correctness and completeness of the initial declaration so that the information release and inspections keep pace with parallel diplomatic and political processes. We apply this approach to the possible denuclearization of North Korea. Such approach can be applied, however, to any agreement requiring the sharing of sensitive information.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Letter from a Supporter in New Zealand to Geraldine Ferraro

Letter from a supporter in New Zealand to Geraldine Ferraro. Author is advocating for peace and global denuclearization. Letter has handwritten notes.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/vice_presidential_campaign_correspondence_1984_international/1129/thumbnail.jp

Coping with a Nuclear North Korea

"China is the biggest loser with a nuclear North Korea." Zhang Liangu is professor of international strategic research at the Party School of the China Communist Party Central Committee

From nuclear threats to nuclear talks: A big win for President Donald Trump? IES Policy Brief No. 4, April 2018

ork for a much-welcomed long-term solution. US President Donald Trump surprised the world by accepting North Korean leader Kim Jongun’s invitation to talk, thereby setting the scene for potentially the first ever meeting between a North Korean leader and a sitting US president. A Trump-Kim summit, which American officials say will take place this coming May or June at a location yet to be determined, would mark a turning point in US-North Korea relations. After a year of escalating tensions and insults between the two leaders, the prospect of talks seems like a welcome development. Americans have looked at North Korea as the land of lousy options for several decades now, so why not try the unprecedented? Yet, Trump’s diplomatic gamble is not without risk. Previous rounds of negotiations have not led to a major breakthrough and have left both sides disappointed. Meanwhile, the increased sophistication of North Korea’s nuclear program is forcing the US to come up with answers. Therefore, if Trump does not play his cards right and the summit is perceived as a failure, he may well provide further excuse for the US to turn to military options to achieve what diplomacy could seemingly not

What Happened to the Soviet Superpower’s Nuclear Arsenal? Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit

Twenty years ago Russia and fourteen other newly-independent states emerged from the ruins of the Soviet empire, many as nations for the first time in history. As is typical in the aftermath of the collapse of an empire, this was followed by a period of chaos, confusion, and corruption. As the saying went at the time, “everything is for sale.” At that same moment, as the Soviet state imploded, 35,000 nuclear weapons remained at thousands of sites across a vast Eurasian landmass that stretched across eleven time zones. Today, fourteen of the fifteen successor states to the Soviet Union are nuclear weapons-free. When the U.S.S.R. disappeared, 3,200 strategic nuclear warheads remained in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, most of them atop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that stood on alert, ready to be fired at targets in the U.S. Today, every one of the nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus has been deactivated and returned to Russia, where they were dismantled and the nuclear material in the warheads blended down to produce fuel for civilian reactors. Strategic nuclear weapons are nuclear warheads aimed at an adversary’s nuclear weapons, cities and military infrastructure. Typically, they are large in yield and heavy. Of greater interest to terrorists, however, were the former U.S.S.R’s 22,000 tactical nuclear weapons with smaller yields and shorter ranges. These were designed primarily for battlefield use, with some small enough to fit into a duffel bag. Today, all of these have also been returned to Russia, leaving zero nuclear weapons in any other state of the former Soviet Union. Former Czech president Vaclav Havel observed about the rush of events in the 1990s: “things have changed so fast we have not yet taken time to be astonished.” Perhaps the most astonishing fact about the past twenty years is something that did not happen. Despite the risk realistically estimated by former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in 3 What Happened to the Soviet Superpower's Nuclear Arsenal? Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit December 1991, two decades have passed without the discovery of a single nuclear weapon outside Russia. This paper will address the question: how did this happen? Looking ahead, it will consider what clues we can extract from the success in denuclearizing fourteen post-Soviet states that can inform our non-proliferation and nuclear security efforts in the future. These clues may inform leaders of the U.S., Russia, and other responsible nations attending the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit on March 26-27, 2012. The paper will conclude with specific recommendations, some exceedingly ambitious that world leaders could follow to build on the Seoul summit’s achievements against nuclear terrorism in the period before the next summit in 2014. One of these would be to establish a Global Alliance Against Nuclear Terrorism

Integration of the Korean peninsula

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