Daily Report Archives
Established in December 1993, the Nautilus Institute’s *N*ortheast *A*sia *P*eace and *S*ecurity *N*etwork (NAPSNet) Daily Report served thousands of readers in more than forty countries, including policy makers, diplomats, aid organizations, scholars, donors, activists, students, and journalists.
The NAPSNet Daily Report aimed to serve a community of practitioners engaged in solving the complex security and sustainability issues in the region, especially those posed by the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program and the threat of nuclear war in the region. It was distributed by email rom 1993-1997, and went on-line in December 1997, which is when the archive on this site begins. The format at that time can be seen here.
However, for multiple reasons—the rise of instantaneous news services, the evolution of the North Korea and nuclear issues, the increasing demand for specialized and synthetic analysis of these and related issues, and the decline in donor support for NAPSNet—the Institute stopped producing the Daily Report news summary service as of December 17, 2010.
United States 1. US DPRK Regime Change US officials talk freely of regime change in Iraq, but not in the DPRK. US-based analysts, however, say some in the US believe the downfall of the DPRK government is the only path to fully dismantling its nuclear programs. For now, the US goal is to muster diplomatic […]
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Michael A. Levi, Director of the Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American Scientists, asserts that today we again find the Bush Administration speaking loosely of tactical uses for nuclear weapons, in Iraq or in future contingencies. The enormous power of nuclear weapons often tempts military planners to inevitably view bigger as better. But the central lesson of the 1966 JASON study, echoed throughout fifty years of thinking about nuclear weapons, is that the wider the context in which nuclear weapons are viewed, the narrower their appeal.
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Willis Stanley is Director of Regional Studies at the National Institute for Public Policy in Fairfax, Virginia. In this essay, Stanley argues that while the JASON 1966 study of Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia sufficiently concludes that in 1967, tactical nuclear weapons were not the tool most appropriate for the job of closing the supply routes between North and South Vietnam, it does not provide any universal truth about the utility of tactical nuclear weapons in 2003, in locales other than Vietnam. The US should not limit itself to assessing the utility of the Cold War nuclear force for the post-Cold War world-we should focus on how to best adapt and transform that force to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Today’s situation on the Korean peninsula is indicative of trends that will shape how we approach the future utility of nuclear weapons.
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Peter Hayes, Executive Director of the Nautilus Institute and Nina Tannenwald of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University argue that the 1966 JASON study on the first use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam is a stark warning that using or threatening to use nuclear weapons against Iraq, North Korea or transnational terrorists would make more likely increase the risk of nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies.
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In the essay below, Weinberg recounts his participation in the 1966 report that urged against the first-use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Vietnam war. Weinberg concludes that today the US should beware of moving beyond nuclear deterrence by developing low-yield weapons for attacking underground facilities. Steven Weinberg won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979 and present teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Nautilus Institute Policy Forum Online: A Bad Idea in Vietnam, an Even Worse Idea Today Nautilus Institute Policy Forum Online: A Bad Idea in Vietnam, an Even Worse Idea Today PFO 03-17: March 9, 2003 A Bad Idea in Vietnam, an Even Worse Idea Today By Peter Hayes and Nina Tannenwald CONTENTS I. Introduction II. […]
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