Reconstituting Korean Security

Download or read book Reconstituting Korean Security written by Hazel Smith and published by UNU. This book was released on 2007 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic national security concerns of nuclear proliferation and the production, sale and use of weapons of mass destruction cannot be addressed in the Korean peninsula without at the same time considering the implications and interrelationship of what are these days known as the human security issues of food, poverty and, perhaps more controversially, freedom.We agree that East Asia and the world are more dangerous with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (the DPRK or North Korea) in possession of nuclear weapons. It is also argued, however, that a comprehensive security analysis identifies many equally significant threats to regional security, such as the risk from industrial and nuclear accidents and the potential for transborder crime arising from the lack of legal and productive avenues for economic activity for North Korea's poverty-stricken citizens. In this book Korea, soft security issues are as important as hard security matters and that the latter cannot be understood, or its dilemmas unravelled, without a clear engagement with the former.This book looks at Korean security dilemmas from the perspective of the various international actors, not just from the viewpoint of the major protagonists the DPRK and the United States. We show that different states and international organizations have different and multiple interests in their relationships with the DPRK and with each other.