The Civil Society Monitoring and Verification Network is a regional response by civil society to the pressure for nuclear proliferation in Japan and South Korea unleashed by the DPRK’s nuclear test on October 9^th, 2006.

The key to addressing this pressure in both South Korea and Japan lies with civil society groups creating new understanding of the implications of a acquiring nuclear weapons, whether via sharing US nuclear weapons, or going it alone. Civil society organizations that are anchored in locales, issues, and social relationships such as diasporas but are also networked across borders of language, history, geopolitics, and cultural disparities, represent a new political and cultural resource in the struggle to stop nuclear weapons proliferation. Rapidly linking, deepening, and coordinating between these new social and political entities in each country will provide a new bulwark against proliferation and possibly a critical one at the “tipping point” of (non) proliferation decisions in coming years.

The Japanese and South Korean Civil Society Monitoring and Verification Project that would track an array of indicators of intention and capability that in aggregate, constitute proliferation propensity. Broadly, the project would report on speeches, visits, capacities, contracts, and many other indicators that bear on proliferation propensity. While other services attempt to collect open source information  in order to determine compliance with declared nuclear facilities and materials, demonstrate “transparency”, or advocate changes in policy or public opinion by providing accurate information or strong analysis, this project aims to hold up a “mirror” to reflect back to influential South Korean and Japanese policy and decision-makers at many levels of society the totality of what they are doing, and how this is viewed externally; and thereby increase the accountability of decision makers in Japan and Korea to constituencies inside and outside of their countries affected by pro- and anti-nuclear weapons decisions.