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This article by Peter Hayes, Executive Director of the Nautilus Institute, was delivered at the 2010 DMZ Peace Congress in Seoul on August 12-14, 2010. 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.

Seung-ho Lee, President of the DMZ Forum (http://www.dmzforum.org/), writes, “An agreement by the two Koreas to register the DMZ for tentative listing as a UNESCO World Heritage Site status will give the Six-Party states a new paradigm for searching for peace on the Korean peninsula and for the denuclearization of North Korea. The environmental and cultural preservation of the DMZ will provide an unprecedented opportunity in resolving the military and political deadlock on the Korean peninsula.”

Timothy Savage, Deputy Director of the Nautilus Institute Seoul Office, writes, “Neither Lee Myung Bak’s hardline policies nor North Korea’s actions have convinced ‘sunshiners,’ particularly among the 486 generation, that they should give up the pursuit of engagement and reconciliation… Older generations inevitably die out, and the ranks of the young generation are not being replenished quickly enough… This means that the 486ers, Korea’s baby boom generation, will occupy an even greater share of the country’s population than they already do. Unless this group changes its established voting patterns, an eventual return to liberal rule is highly likely, perhaps as soon as the next presidential election.”