Getting to Nuclear Zero in Northeast Asia

This book presents realistic alternatives to security policies based on nuclear weapons for the Northeast Asian region.

Northeast Asian governments and populations feel less secure than ever, and the governments of the USA, Russia, China, and North Korea are all expending considerable resources on increasing their nuclear arsenals. This book presents realistic alternatives to security policies dependent on threats to use nuclear weapons and demonstrations of the resolve to use them in a war. Those alternatives are grounded in the well-established concept of common security. The long-term goal of these alternatives is the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in Northeast Asia. This book demonstrates that lessons learned during the creation of existing nuclear-weapon-free zones can be successfully adapted, using the proposed alternatives to nuclear threats, to the considerably more challenging circumstances that exist in contemporary Northeast Asia. More importantly, it makes the case that the mere process of pursuing this objective, even if the goal is not realized for many decades, would help facilitate regional risk-reduction measures and global nuclear arms control measures that could lead, in the long term, to the general and complete disarmament promised by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) of 2021. This book will be of interest to students of nuclear proliferation, Asian security, foreign policy, and International Relations.

Gregory Kulacki is the East Asia Project Director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, USA, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition at Nagasaki University, Japan.

Keiko Nakamura is an Associate Professor at the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University (RECNA), Japan.

Jae-Jung Suh is Professor of International Relations at International Christian University, Japan and author and editor of several books on security in Northeast Asia and Korea.

Tatsujiro Suzuki is a Visiting Professor at the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University (RECNA), Japan. Before joining RECNA, he served as Vice Chairman of Japan Atomic Energy Commission from 2010 to 2014. He is the author of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power (2017).