The Six Party Talks And The North Korean Nuclear Issue

North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has provoked much apprehension in the international community in recent years. The Six Party Talks were convened in 2003 to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. They brought together the US, China, Russia, Japan as well as North and South Korea in the effort to negotiate a multilateral resolution of North Korea’s nuclear program but the parties had widely different views and approaches. This book will examine the Six Party Talks as a study in multilateral negotiation highlighting the expectations vested in them and their inability to develop a common approach to the issue. It holds out some important lessons for multilateral negotiation, diplomacy and dealing with North Korea.

The book traces the past decade of dynamic interactions among the concerned states involved in the Six-Party Talks on North Korean nuclear programs. Unlike existing studies which usually dissect incidents of the talks, the book provides a comprehensive systemic analysis of the Six-Party Talks process from A to Z. These new insights into the nuclear drama in the Northeast Asian region will be of value to scholars, policy makers, and analysts.

This study makes northeast Asia the focus of analysis on how the nuclear crisis in 2002-2006 affected strategic thinking. While all those in the Six-Party Talks are included, the author explores in particular debates about the standoff in four countries on the front lines (South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia).

China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea have struggled to navigate between the unsettling belligerence of North Korea and the often unilateral insistence of the United States on how to proceed. This book focuses on their strategic thinking and internal debates over four stages of the crisis.

Jina Kim investigates how North Korea rationalized its pursuit of nuclear weapons programs for more than two decades, by exploring the dialectical development of the nuclear crisis and the obstacles generated by complex internal Korean dynamics and conflicting interests amongst the major players concerned.