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Relations between the two Koreas continue to be hostile, volatile and unpredictable with North Korea's nuclear issue remaining as untamed as ever. As such, there is a growing urgency for security cooperation in Northeast Asia to be given immediate attention. The key players in the region - the US, China, Japan and Russia - are keenly aware of the security threat of an armed clash between North and South Korea and are committed to denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. This book explores the domestic factors of the two Koreas and the four major powers that influence their security policies towards North Korea and Northeast Asia. This well thought out and consistently analysed volume has huge potential to frame the conversation on Northeast Asian relations in the coming years.

North Korea has remained a thorn in the side of the United States ever since its creation in the aftermath of the Korean conflict of 1950-1953. Crafting a foreign policy that effectively deals with North Korea, while still ensuring stability and security on the Korean Peninsula-and in Northeast Asia as a whole-has proved very challenging for successive American administrations. In the wake of ruler Kim Jong-il's death in December 2011, analysts and policymakers continue to speculate about the effect his last years as leader will have on the future of North Korea.Bruce Bechtol, Jr. contends that Kim Jong-il's regime (1994-2011) exacerbated the threats that North Korea posed, and still poses, to the world. Bechtol explains how North Korea presents important challenges on five key fronts: its evolving conventional military threat, its strategy in the Northern Limit Line (NLL) area, its nuclear capabilities, its support for terrorism, and its handling of the succession process.Bechtol's analysis clears up the persistent mystery of how Kim Jong-il's dysfunctional government in its final years was able to persist in power while both presenting a grave danger to its neighbors and setting the stage for the current government. This work addresses issues important for policymakers and academics who must deal with those in power in North Korea.

Why does North Korea want to possess nuclear capabilities? In order to find the answer to this question, we must have an accurate understanding of the history and structure of the North Korean regime. So far, we have only formed conjectures and predictions regarding North Korea based on our own perspectives; we now need to deal with and consider North Korea “as is” to reach viable solutions to the issues North Korea presents. This volume contains analyses of the most salient, critical issues pertinent to understanding the North Korean regime, penned by representative Korean scholars of North Korea. As such, the book examines the historical formation of North Korea, the identities of those power elite, and the relative stability (or instability, as the case may be) of the new regime under Kim Jong-un. Also an important aspect to consider is the possibility of socio-economic change in North Korea. Though North Korea has remained relatively static vis-à-vis its political and military systems, it is in the process of becoming rapidly marketized, having continued various attempts to modify its economic policy. In the social realm, said economic shift has elicited the polarization of the disparate classes and the expansion of individualism. Such social transformations, obscured by the easily visible political reality of North Korea, can provide solid grounds for determining the future of the North Korea regime. Moreover, it is imperative that we accurately understand the motivation behind North Korea’s intention to develop nuclear weapons—namely, the expansion of deterrence. We must recognize the reasons for the North Korean hostility toward the United States from the very beginning of the DPRK formation and the North Korean fixation on nuclear weapons development. Further, we need to understand the nature of relations between China and North Korea—relations on which the international community has focused since North Korea began its nuclear testing—as well as the history and structure of relations between North and South Korea. Only when we accurately understand North Korea can we reach solutions to the North Korean nuclear issue. The studies in this volume by Korean scholars will reveal the veiled background of the visible phenomena and thereby help the readers to correctly understand the North Korean behaviors hitherto misunderstood (or even those that were impossible to understand).

North Korea remains a puzzle to Americans. How did this country—one of the most isolated in the world and in the policy cross hairs of every U.S. administration during the past 30 years—progress from zero nuclear weapons in 2001 to a threatening arsenal of perhaps 50 such weapons in 2021? Hinge Points brings readers literally inside the North Korean nuclear program, joining Siegfried Hecker to see what he saw and hear what he heard in his visits to North Korea from 2004 to 2010. Hecker goes beyond the technical details—described in plain English from his on-the-ground experience at the North's nuclear center at Yongbyon—to put the nuclear program exactly where it belongs, in the context of decades of fateful foreign policy decisions in Pyongyang and Washington. Describing these decisions as \"hinge points,\" he traces the consequences of opportunities missed by both sides. The result has been that successive U.S. administrations have been unable to prevent the North, with the weakest of hands, from becoming one of only three countries in the world that might target the United States with nuclear weapons. Hecker's unique ability to marry the technical with the diplomatic is well informed by his interactions with North Korean and U.S. officials over many years, while his years of working with Russian, Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani nuclear officials have given him an unmatched breadth of experience from which to view and interpret the thinking and perspective of the North Koreans.

With nearly twenty-five million citizens, a secretive totalitarian dictatorship, and active nuclear and ballistic missile weapons programs, North Korea presents some of the world's most difficult foreign policy challenges. For decades, the United States and its partners have employed multiple strategies in an effort to prevent Pyongyang from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Washington has moved from the Agreed Framework under President Bill Clinton to George W. Bush's denunciation of the regime as part of the \"axis of evil\" to a posture of \"strategic patience\" under Barack Obama. Given that a new president will soon occupy the White House, policy expert Walter C. Clemens Jr. argues that now is the time to reconsider US diplomatic efforts in North Korea. InNorth Korea and the World, Clemens poses the question, \"Can, should, and must we negotiate with a regime we regard as evil?\" Weighing the needs of all the stakeholders -- including China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea -- he concludes that the answer is yes. After assessing nine other policy options, he makes the case for engagement and negotiation with the regime. There still may be time to freeze or eliminate North Korea's weapons of mass destruction. Grounded in philosophy and history, this volume offers a fresh road map for negotiators and outlines a grand bargain that balances both ethical and practical security concerns.

Offers an insider's analysis of developments on the Korean peninsula and how North Korea was able to develop nuclear weapons. Provides a first-hand account of how the Six-Party Talks were initiated, with a step-by-step review of each round of negotiations, detailing the national interests of the key players.

Nearly half a century after the fighting stopped, the 1953 Armistice has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War. While Russia and China withdrew the last of their forces in 1958, the United States maintains 37,000 troops in South Korea and is pledged to defend it with nuclear weapons. In Korean Endgame, Selig Harrison mounts the first authoritative challenge to this long-standing U.S. policy. Harrison shows why North Korea is not--as many policymakers expect--about to collapse. And he explains why existing U.S. policies hamper North-South reconciliation and reunification. Assessing North Korean capabilities and the motivations that have led to its forward deployments, he spells out the arms control concessions by North Korea, South Korea, and the United States necessary to ease the dangers of confrontation, centering on reciprocal U.S. force redeployments and U.S. withdrawals in return for North Korean pullbacks from the thirty-eighth parallel.

A North Korean government collapse would have serious consequences, including a humanitarian disaster and civil war. The Republic of Korea and the United States can help mitigate the consequences, seeking unification by being prepared to deliver humanitarian aid in the North, stop conflict, demilitarize the North Korean military over time, secure and eliminate North Korean weapons of mass destruction, and manage Chinese intervention.

In June 1994 the United States went to the brink of war with North Korea. With economic sanctions impending, President Bill Clinton approved the dispatch of substantial reinforcements to Korea, and plans were prepared for attacking the North's nuclear weapons complex. The turning point came in an extraordinary private diplomatic initiative by former President Jimmy Carter and others to reverse the dangerous American course and open the way to a diplomatic settlement of the nuclear crisis. Few Americans know the full details behind this story or perhaps realize the devastating impact it could have had on the nation's post-Cold War foreign policy. In this lively and authoritative book, Leon Sigal offers an inside look at how the Korean nuclear crisis originated, escalated, and was ultimately defused. He begins by exploring a web of intelligence failures by the United States and intransigence within South Korea and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Sigal pays particular attention to an American mindset that prefers coercion to cooperation in dealing with aggressive nations. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with policymakers from the countries involved, he discloses the details of the buildup to confrontation, American refusal to engage in diplomatic give-and-take, the Carter mission, and the diplomatic deal of October 1994. In the post-Cold War era, the United States is less willing and able than before to expend unlimited resources abroad; as a result it will need to act less unilaterally and more in concert with other nations. What will become of an American foreign policy that prefers coercion when conciliation is more likely to serve its national interests? Using the events that nearly led the United States into a second Korean War, Sigal explores the need for policy change when it comes to addressing the challenge of nuclear proliferation and avoiding conflict with nations like Russia, Iran, and Iraq. What the Cuban missile crisis was to fifty years of superpower conflict, the North Korean nuclear crisis is to the coming era.