In 2006, public reports began to circulate that North Korea was constructing a large new rocket testing and launching center in a rural North-western coastal valley. A Jane's article by Bermudez nicknamed the complex Pongdong-ni and reported on some of the individual facilities. Coming in the aftermath of the 2006 Taepo-dong II launch failure from the existing Musadun-ri launch center on North Korea's East coast, there has been world-wide  speculation and ‘expert' analysis, much of it based on Google Earth images which have not been updated since 2003 (Musadun-ri) and 2006 (Pongdong-ni).  A recent government report that a rocket engine test occured during the summer of 2008 ratcheted up the media rhetoric: meanwhile little has been admitted by North Korea. In our presentation, we will examine the growth of the DPRK's rocket programs using commercial tools and satellite visible and multispectral data previously available only the government intelligence and military analysts.  In our presentation:

1. We will assess and compare the capabilities and completion schedules of Pongdong- ni and  Musadun-ri,
2. Present important new policy issues that are presented by these major facility investments,
3. Show examples of how Open Source Technical Intelligence can provide an improved public understanding of foreign WMD activities independently of government and partisan policy centers.  
4. Comment on last weeks Iranian satellite launch using North Korean developed rockets. 

Lew Franklin is a long-time CISAC Affiliate, joining CISAC in 1992 as a Visiting Scholar after retiring as a TRW vice president, and previously vice president and co-founder of ESL, a defense intelligence company.  Upon retirement he was awarded the CIA's Gold Medal for career-long contributions to foreign weapons assessment and national technical means capabilities.  At CISAC his work focused on technical intelligence related problems, including wmd proliferation, export controls, defense conversion, and especially conversion of retired ICBMs for low-cost space launches.  In 1993, he headed the launch campaign that mated the Stanford Quakesat satellite onto a retired Russian SS-19 Rokot launcher for a successful launch to orbit.  His current research into Open Source Technical Intelligence is in support of the upcoming visit to North Korea led by Lewis and Hecker.

Nick Hansen graduated with a BA in Geography from Syracuse University in 1964.  His career in national intelligence spans 43 years first as an Army imagery analyst, and then in industry with GTE-EDL, ESL/TRW, Tera Research as a cofounder Vice Pres. and then again at ESL (now TRW/Northrop-Grumman) as a Director. Currently he is in an SES position at the Navy's NIOC-Suitland, MD, as an image technology expert associated with Pennsylvania State University.  He has been twice nominated for the NRO's Pioneer award for innovative imagery uses and techniques development and is an expert in foreign weapons systems and test ranges. Currently Nick is supporting John Lewis' North Korea project.

North Korea is widely regarded internationally as a long-term threat to regional peace and stability and to the international nuclear nonproliferation regime. Conservatives support the use of sanctions and other pressures to counter these threats, while liberals hope that reasonable efforts at accommodation will persuade the Pyongyang regime to change course. Professor Lankov maintains that neither approach will work. He urges a new approach, based on engagement but with the long-term goal of inducing regime change from within North Korea.

Andrei Lankov, a historian of Korea and one of the world's top experts on North Korea, is an associate professor at Kookmin University in Seoul. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees at Leningrad State University and attended Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, North Korea. He has also taught at Leningrad State University and Australian National University. Lankov is the author of many books in English, Korean, and Russian, including From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945-1960; Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956; North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea; and The Dawn of Modern Korea. Among his most recent articles is "Staying Alive: Why North Korea Will Not Change," which appeared in the March/April 2008 edition of Foreign Affairs. He is also a columnist for the Chosun Ilbo and Korea Times in South Korea.

This special seminar is supported by a generous grant from Koret Foundation.

North Korea has often been considered an aberration in the post-Cold War international system, a relic of a Stalinist past. In fact, a close examination of North Korean foreign relations during the Cold War period reveals that Pyongyang's behavior never fit neatly into the paradigm of a bipolar international order, and that the Cold War itself had a distinctive dynamic in the Korean context. This dynamic helps to explain the continued existence of a divided Korea to this day, long after the bipolar international system has ended. Based largely on formerly secret materials from North Korea's Cold War allies in Eastern Europe, this paper suggests that Pyongyang's "aberrent" behavior long pre-dates the 1990s. It argues that North Korea has exhibited more continuity than change in the way it has dealt with the outside world over the last several decades, focusing on three areas of foreign policy: economic extraction, political non-alignment, and the development of an independent nuclear weapons capability.

Charles K. Armstrong is The Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences in the Department of History and the Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University. In the fall semester of 2008 he was a Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University.

A specialist in the modern history of Korea and East Asia, Professor Armstrong is the author or editor of several books, including The Koreas (Routledge, 2007), The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell, 2003), Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia (M.E. Sharpe, 2006), and Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State (Routledge, second edition 2006), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters.  His current book projects include a study of North Korean foreign relations in the Cold War era and a history of modern East Asia.

Professor Armstrong holds a B.A. in Chinese Studies from Yale University, an M.A. in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. He has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 1996.

Alexander Montgomery, a visiting assistant professor in 2008-09, was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC in 2005-2006 and is an assistant professor of political science at Reed College. He has published articles on dismantling proliferation networks and on the effects of social networks of international organizations on interstate conflict. His research interests include political organizations, social networks, weapons of mass disruption and destruction, social studies of technology, and interstate social relations. His current book project is on post-Cold War U.S. counterproliferation policy, evaluating the efficacy of policies towards North Korea, Iran, and proliferation networks.

He has been a joint International Security Program/Managing the Atom Project Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has also worked as a research associate in high energy physics on the BaBar experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as a graduate research assistant at the Center for International Security Affairs at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has a BA in physics from the University of Chicago, an MA in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in sociology and a PhD in political science from Stanford University.

Emilie Hafner-Burton is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Politics at Princeton University and an affiliate at CISAC, as well as a visiting fellow at Stanford Law School. Formerly she was a predoctoral fellow at CISAC and an associated fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She was at Oxford University as a Postdoctoral Research Prize Fellow, Nuffield College, and Senior Associate, Global Economic Governance Programme. She writes and teaches on international organization, international political economy, the global governance of gender, social network analysis, design and selection of international regimes, international human rights law and policy, war and economic sanctions, non-proliferation policy, and quantitative and qualitative research design. Her dissertation, Globalizing Human Rights? How Preferential Trade Agreements Shape Government Repression, 1972-2000, won the American Political Science Association Helen Dwight Reid Award for Best Dissertation in International Relations, Law and Politics for 2004-2005, as well as the Best Dissertation in Human Rights Prize for 2003-2004. Her articles are published or forthcoming in International Organization, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Feminist Legal Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Journal of European Public Policy, and Journal of Peace Research. PhD. Wisconsin.

Walter W. Powell is Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication at Stanford University. He is also an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. He is co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. He joined the Stanford faculty in July 1999, after previously teaching at the University of Arizona, MIT, and Yale. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences three times, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna twice. Powell has received honorary degrees from Uppsala University, the Helsinki School of Economics, and Copenhagen Business School, and is a foreign member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. He is a U.S. editor for Research Policy, and has been a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council since 2000.