Kawasaki Akira, Peace Boat Executive Committee member and ICNND NGO Advisor, writes, “There are several evident tasks for Japanese civil society in relation to its upcoming engagement with the ICNND. Firstly… civil society efforts to ensure the participation of Diet members and key party policy-makers as part of its engagement with the ICNND will be key… The second task is to utilise ICNND debates as the first step towards a reexamination of Japan’s nuclear disarmament policy in the leadup to the 2010 NPT Review Conference… The third task is… [that] civil society engagement with the ICNND must not be limited to just Japan, but also spread to Korea, China, and the whole of Northeast Asia.”

Rudiger Frank, Chair of East Asian Economy and Society at the University of Vienna, writes, “If we want to discourage the DPRK from reprocessing more fuel rods, from further refining their ICMBs and from developing a functioning nuclear warhead, we should stop telling them that all their efforts so far are not enough. By ridiculing these attempts, we win a small propaganda victory but also demonstrate to Pyongyang that they must work harder on these issues.”

James Goodby, former U.S. Ambassador to Finland and a Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and Markku Heiskanen, Senior Fellow at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) in Copenhagen, write, “It is clear is that only a comprehensive approach to the security problems of Northeast Asia will really get at the basic issues… By expressing a willingness to negotiate other mili­tary, political and economic issues together with the nuclear issue, the U.S. can significantly improve the political conditions for the negotiations.”