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.
Lee Byong-Chul, senior fellow with the Institute for Peace and Cooperation (IPC) in Seoul, South Korea, writes, “With a new generation rising to power now is the time to focus on the young North Korean technocrats who are willing to reform their country in a way that can help it develop. This will give the North Koreans incentive to engage the outside world. It’s time the global organizations, in particular the United Nations, should try to steer North Korea toward development and co-existence instead of waiting for it to collapse.”
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Leon V. Sigal, Director, Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council, writes, “While broaching the subject of a NWFZ runs political risks, conventional deterrence continues to operate on the Korean Peninsula. The South has long had conventional forces capable of defeating the North, with or without U.S. troops, and the North has long held Seoul hostage to its forward-deployed artillery. The North’s nuclear weapons affect the balance of power on the Korean Peninsula insofar as they could put U.S. forces and bases in Japan at risk.”
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A Korea-Japan Nuclear Weapon Free Zone (hereafter KJNWFZ) is a new concept. Once realized, it could help resolve a number of linked and intractable security issues in Northeast Asia at the same time. This includes the need to respond to North Korea’s nuclear breakout without undermining the Global Abolition policy announced by President Obama; the need for Japan and Korea to deepen their non-nuclear commitments to more deeply ingrained “forever” status without hedging; and the need for Japan-Korean cooperation to lay the foundations for a comprehensive security mechanism and long-term regional security institution, including through cooperative nuclear fuel cycle and space development activities.
A version of this concept paper is also available in Korean and Japanese.
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