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Three US administrations have failed to avoid North Korean breakout from the NonProliferation Treaty and a gaping hole in the IAEA safeguards system. Nuclear war is once again conceivable in Korea after a brief interlude in the early 1990s when this prospect all but disappeared. The North's announcement on October 4, 2006 that it intends to test a nuclear weapon underscores this failure.

Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote Enduring Legacies: Economic Dimensions of Restoring North Korea's Environment. This essay not only described a set of urgent environmental problems in North Korea, but also described its institutional and legal framework for environmental management. At the time, I had no idea that so many years would pass with no improvement in North Korea's situation. It has actually become far worse than I could then imagine. In 1994, I led a UN mission charged with helping North Korea to compile its first greenhouse gas emissions inventory for its national report under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which North Korea had signed. Part of the justification for providing Global Environment Facility (GEF) funding for greenhouse gas reduction projects in North Korea was the creation of other benefits such as biodiversity. For this reason, I was looking into reforestation in North Korea as a way to capture carbon from the air as a way to preserve and restore biodiversity. I was talking over dinner with the head of North Korea's biodiversity program about such a project. He offered to pour me a shot of liquor from a bottle containing a snake. I demurred but he insisted, saying the snake liquor for public sale was low grade whereas this one — a snake with a diamond head not a square one — was the real thing, made from a rare and endangered species!

This essay examines the role that nuclear weapons have played in Northeast Asia in creating a system of inter-state relations based in part on nuclear threat and the impact of North Korea on that system. The US-led alliances that rest on extended nuclear deterrence have been characterized as hegemonic in the forty years of Cold War in the Gramscian sense of hegemonic, that is, allied elites accepted US leadership based on its legitimating ideology of extended nuclear deterrence, institutional integration, and unique American nuclear forces that underpinned the alliances. A crucial aspect of American nuclear hegemony in Asia was the guarantee that the hegemon would ensure that no adversary could break out of the system after China's 1964 successful nuclear test, as expressed by the Non Proliferation Treaty and IAEA safeguard system. The failure of the United States to stop and now reverse the DPRK nuclear over the previous two decades threatens its hegemonic leadership in Northeast Asia, and is linked to the decreasing ability of American power to shape events in other proliferation-prone regions such as South and West Asia.

Jungmin Kang, Science Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University, and Peter Hayes, Nautilus Institute Executive Director, write, “Having tested and failed, the DPRK can no longer rely on opacity as the basis for having a credible nuclear force, at least sufficiently credible to threaten its adversaries with a nuclear explosion. The DPRK might believe that a half kilotonne “mininuke” still provides it with a measure of nuclear deterrence and compellence; but it could not rely on other nuclear weapons states to perceive it to have anything more than an unusable, unreliable and relatively small nuclear explosive device.”

Declassified US Embassy Seoul cables related to nuclear proliferation during the Park Chung Hee era show that, far from making South Korea more secure, Park's toying with the nuclear option made him an unpredictable and even dangerous client who needed restraint in the eyes of US policymakers.

The participants at the six-party talks should consider the full scope of activities needed to implement the South Korean scheme; that they should explore an alternative approach that would link the Russian and South Korean grids, thereby achieving the same outcome at lower cost and lesser political risk; and that the six parties should consider adopting a short-term, alternative package rather than resuming HFO deliveries to the DPRK because this approach would provide more energy services, faster, and at lower risk and cost to give immediate substance to statements of longer “term intention to supply assistance to the DPRK. We further suggest that these issues be explored with the North Koreans at the six-party talks at a subsequent technical working group before major commitments are made to proceeding with the South Korean proposal.

This paper proposes the creation of a Northeast Asian Biodiversity Corridor (NEABC) that would connect in a consistent manner critical habitat in Russia, China, and the Korean Peninsula. Such a corridor may be considered now because of decades of scientific and policy work to establish a DMZ Peace Park, a mountain-watershed ecosystem network in the ROK, nature reserves in the DPRK, and cross-border mega-species migration corridors between the DPRK, China, and Russia. The paper reviews each of these stepping and foundation stones, and refers to proposed regional biodiversity corridors in other regions. It emphasizes parallels between the Northeast Asian context and that of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC), an existing regional biodiversity corridor which involves eight Central American countries that, like the two Koreas, are trapped in inter-state conflicts. It suggests that the Korean traditional concept of “The Baekdudaegan” that integrates the cultural and ecological landscapes of the mountains and rivers of Korea may be an important cultural device that frames the ecological basis of a regional NEABC. The paper reflects on how indirect and incremental social and political engagement may be a necessary attribute of strategies that build ecological security in a conflict zone. It concludes by contrasting this approach to the characteristics of what the author terms “nuclear insecurity” and suggests that a Northeast Asian Nuclear Weapon Free Zone may be a form of nuclear insecurity that relies less on balances of terror, and thereby is more conducive to the creation of sustainable security in this region.

A Korean Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (WFZ) may be a necessary condition to achieving the full denuclearization of Korea. As well as providing benefits to the United States in preventing a major direct and wider proliferation threat from North Korea, and to China, Japan and South Korea in maintaining stability in the Northeast Asian Region, it would also serve to address North Korean security concerns about potential US nuclear strikes. The two Koreas have already negotiated a legal basis for a Korean Nuclear Weapon Free Zone in the form of the 1992 Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korea Peninsula. This could form the basis of a NWFZ covering the peninsula. Alternatively, the ROK and Japan could create a Japan Korea NWFZ via a bilateral treaty. This article assesses the prospects for the creation of a NWFZ in the present international climate.

In the last few weeks, Kim Jong Il has inspected a pig farm, a mine, a solar thermal energy research unit, a restaurant, an orchestra, and even gave field guidance to the Tudan Duck Farm on how to raise these pesky birds, where he reportedly enjoyed an art performance given by the members of the art group of the Pyongyang Poultry Guidance Bureau at the newly built house of culture of the farm, and congratulated them on their successful performance. He also travelled to the industrial east coast city of Hamhung, a crosscountry trip that one of the authors, having done it, can attest requires a bit of effort. Accompanied by his son, Kim Jong Il even managed to visit a terrapin farm. Given all these visits, how one might ask, does the peripatetic Kim Jong Il find time for his commander-in-chief military and foreign policy duties?

The signal to noise ratio on the Korean Peninsula is usually very low with a great deal of noise and only a few signals. Recently, the signals increased in amplitude and frequency, but so too has the noise. Interpreting the signals correctly is even more challenging when the parties are not talking to each other but rather, past each other.

The earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 did more than just devastate Japan and unleash a local nuclear disaster. They exposed a host of design flaws in current nuclear technology whose solutions are linked to dramatically unsettling security issues.

Director of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability and an Asia-Pacific Journal Associate. Recent publications include Extended Nuclear Deterrence, Global Abolition, and Korea and The Path Not Taken, The Way Still Open: Denuclearizing The Korean Peninsula And Northeast Asia (with Michael Hamel-Green)

Recommended Citation: Peter Hayes, “Global Perspectives on Nuclear Safety and Security After 3-11,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 14, No 3, April 2, 2012.

To anyone not serving in the American or Korean armies along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the current talk of war and nuclear war is surreal and archaic, a throwback to an earlier and more dangerous era, a time when Bob Dylan sang about feeling lonesome and blue about walking into World War III with bad dreams in his head.

This article assesses the current risk of war on the Korean peninsula in light of renewed North-South, US-North and US-China tensions in the wake of the US decision to implement the THAAD program in South Korea, current US-ROK military exercises, and North Korea's recent nuclear test. It suggests a course in which political initiatives overcome recent military moves that increase tensions in the region.

A critically important part of assembling the Korean peninsula-wide denuclearization jigsaw puzzle is the institutional and legal form of North Korean commitments on the one hand, and the nuclear negative security assurances by the NPT-Nuclear Weapons States (NWSs), especially the United States, on the other. Given the risk of mutual annihilation between the two Koreas as well as to third parties such as the United States, Japan, and China, finding a way to square this circle is urgent.

The Nautilus Institute has published a special report 'A Korean nuclear weapons-free zone treaty and nuclear extended deterrence: options for denuclearising the Korean Peninsula, A Korean Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone Treaty and Nuclear Extended Deterence: Options for Denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula

The imbroglio over the new Sony film The Interview is a sideshow that reveals that the Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it, has lost the plot with regard to North Korea. The real game is to stop, reverse and end North Korea's nuclear weapons breakout. Its handling of The Interview has managed to distract the US government from this strategic imperative, increase the risk of war, including nuclear war, and made it harder than ever to advance American vital security interests in relation to North Korea's nuclear threat.

This paper sketches how nuclear threat is woven into inter-state relations in the Northeast Asian region, and the case for reducing and ending such threats against non-nuclear weapons states (hereafter NNWSs). It then outlines how a regional nuclear weapons-free zone could bring about an end to such nuclear threats, and describes how the DPRK's active participation might be an integral part of such a zone from the outset. The paper also addresses the central issue of nuclear extended deterrence in the region, and suggests that it is possible to square the circle—that is, to end nuclear threats by nuclear weapons states (hereafter NWSs) in the region against NNWSs by creating a NWFZ—but maintaining strategic deterrence between the NWS should one of them threaten to use or attack a NNWS party to the zone, or should a NNWS party to the treaty break out and proliferate nuclear weapons. Finally, the paper argues that it is in the interests of all states in the region to create a NWFZ because all of them are subject to nuclear threat today; and, it is the only way whereby they can create a stabilizing framework within which to manage, reduce, and eventually abolish nuclear threat in Northeast Asia, including those aimed at and coming from the DPRK.