North Korean Decisionmaking

This report is a compilation of three papers designed to stimulate discussion among those who are focused on North Korean decisionmaking. The first paper describes the experiences of North Korea and three similar authoritarian regimes — China, Vietnam, and Cuba — and provides a forecast of why and how North Korea might adopt a new economic model. The second paper describes decisions that the North Korean leadership might face in two scenarios in which conventional deterrence on the Korean Peninsula breaks down. The final paper provides an assessment of North Korean leadership decisionmaking about nuclear weapons doctrine. Despite the many unknowns surrounding the North Korean leadership decisionmaking process, these papers constructively outline the parameters of the North Korean decisionmaking "trade space" and the historical examples from which North Korean leaders might draw

North Korean Decisionmaking

Discerning the decisionmaking of Kim Jong-Un and the North Korean regime on issues of peaceful engagement and warlike actions endures as a mighty challenge for U.S. intelligence analysts and policymakers. In this report, we seek to inform analysis of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) leadership decisionmaking. To do so, we use three discussion papers that were written to facilitate discussion of an interagency working group. The three papers are assembled here in a single report. The first discussion paper describes decisionmaking among different authoritarian regimes, including North Korea, and the opening up of those economies to outside engagement. The second paper outlines two different scenarios that might occur when conventional deterrence on the Korean Peninsula breaks down and the resulting decisions that North Korea’s leadership could face. The third paper assesses DPRK decisionmaking about nuclear weapon use. The report concludes with some observations, drawn from the issues covered in these three discussion papers, about DPRK decisionmaking and stability on the Korean Peninsula

Case Studies of Organizational Learning in Five Terrorist Groups

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Groups and Its Implications for Combating Terrorism

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NGOs as catalysts for international arms control? The ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the United States

The article investigates the role of pro-arms control non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in furthering the domestic ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in the United States. The study starts out from the two-level framework for analysing domestic ratification processes of international agreements, and it introduces the concept of audience gains to complement this framework: being the counterpart of audience costs, audience gains denote positive contributions of domestic non-state actors to formal ratification processes. The article distinguishes two complementary pathways for NGOs to generate audience gains, that is, the pathways of ‘mobilising consensus’ and of ‘persuading veto players’. Two in-depth case studies on the ratification of the CWC and the CTBT in the US explore the extent to which pro-agreement NGOs were indeed successful in employing the two pathways. The evidence of the case studies is that NGOs were more influential catalysts of the ratification of the CWC than with respect to the CTBT. The article's findings on the prospects for NGOs to push the domestic ratification of international agreements are expected to be of more general relevance beyond the field of arms control

Effect of Previous Failure on Subsequent Procedural Outcomes of Chronic Total Occlusion Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (from a Contemporary Multicenter Registry)

We sought to examine the impact of previous failure on the outcomes of chronic total occlusion (CTO) percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). We examined the clinical and angiographic characteristics and procedural outcomes of 1,213 consecutive patients who underwent 1,232 CTO PCIs from 2012 to 2015 at 12 US centers. Mean age was 65 ± 10 years, and 84.8% of patients were men. A previously failed attempt had been performed in 215 patients (17.5%). As compared with patients without previous CTO PCI failure, patients with previous failure had higher Multicenter CTO Registry in Japan CTO score (2.40 ± 1.13 vs 3.28 ± 1.29,