Journal Articles

Differing approaches by key stakeholders to the North Korean nuclear issue is a manifestation of the security competition among some of them, especially the two Koreas, the United States, and China. These major players have competing visions of national security objectives and priorities, including regional peace, regime stability, alliance relationship, security assurance, and denuclearization. Some objectives are overlapping, while others might be conflicting. For some countries, the pursuit of some objectives might be contradictory to the pursuit of other objectives.

When the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in August 1945, it launched a grand contest between two forces: nations determined to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and those determined to acquire their own. Early hopes of a long-lasting American atomic monopoly were dashed by the Soviet Union’s first atomic test in 1949, followed by Great Britain in 1952, France in 1960, and China in 1964. Three more nations (Israel, India, and South Africa) successfully crossed the nuclear threshold by 1980, and by 1990 Pakistan had joined the nuclear club as well.

Arms control treaties deal with sensitive issue of national security. States that come to an agreement through a compromise balancing their interests want to make sure that the other party is fulfilling its obligations and that fulfilling your own obligations does not put you at a relative disadvantage. That is why arms control agreements are rarely self-executing. Even though it is generally believed that states enter international treaties in good faith and are expected to abide by their commitments, contracting parties usually verify that the obligations are observed.

This article analyzes nuclear weapons related scholarship as a subset of security studies particularly prone to self-censorship, even in the post-Cold War era. It argues that self-censorship effects come from the joint use of the notions of deterrence and non-proliferation and the invocation of an expected veto player. The effects of the words 'proliferation' and 'deterrence' and the assumption that a supposedly important player in nuclear policy will veto proposals for change, create avenues for self-censorship and delegitimize transformative thinking.

Nuclear proliferation issue has occupied the central position of the North East Asia area for more than 20 years.  Besides nuclear proliferation problem, there are still many other quarrels and disputes among the countries of this region.  Instead of discussing the proliferation issue technically and tactically, this paper would like to place this issue under a wider strategic context to find a way out and mainly focus on the relationships between or among China, ROK and Japan.

How do leaders assess the intentions of their counterparts under uncertainty? This study
addresses this question by analyzing the development of nuclear programs. The technology
needed to build nuclear weapons and produce nuclear energy is indistinguishable. How,
then, can leaders identify a nuclear developer’s true intentions? An influential body of
literature suggests that costly signals play a key role in shaping states’ beliefs about whether a
developer of nuclear technology covets energy or bombs. I argue, however, that leader-centric

Dima Adamsky, Associate Professor, School of Government, and Institute for Policy and Strategy, at IDC Herzliya, provides a concise undertsanding of Putin's strategy in Syria.

From Anne Harrington's latest article, she writes, "From its inception, nuclear strategy has been a profoundly ahistorical field. Only recently have scholars begun to exploit the wealth of evidentiary knowledge generated during the Cold War, whether that be in the form of diplomatic history or creating data sets against which to test rational choice models. Mining that data has revolutionary potential.