Korean Studies Program Director Gi-Wook Shin comments on U.S. unwillingness to engage North Korea, on the occasion of South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun's visit to Washington, DC.

Shin notes that South Koreans do not want military conflict on the Korean peninsula, and that the United Stease must engage North Korea in a more effective and constructive manner once the Six-Party talks are restarted.

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After an intensive selection process, the Asia-Pacific Research Center at the Stanford Institute for International Studies has selected the 2005-2006 recipients of its Pantech Fellowships in Korean Studies for Mid-Career Professionals.

Daniel Sneider and Scott Snyder will be in residence during the 2005-2006 academic year and collaborate with the faculty and fellows in the Korean Studies Program and at APARC. The fellowships were made possible by generous gift from the Pantech Group. Professor Gi-Wook Shin, the director of the Korean Studies Program is excited to welcome the new fellows. "Considerable tension currently exists in the U.S.-Korea relationship, which is complicating the management of that alliance," he observed. "Dan Sneider and Scott Snyder are both well-established experts on U.S.-Korea relations -- and disconnects --and their work at APARC will contribute not only to our program here at Stanford, but also to the larger relationship between the two countries."

An accomplished journalist, Daniel Sneider has had a long career in reporting foreign affairs, and is currently foreign affairs writer for the San Jose Mercury News. His weekly column for that paper focuses on the Asia-Pacific, national security issues, and news analysis, and is syndicated on the Knight Ridder Tribune service, reaching about 400 newspapers. His writings have appeared in numerous other publications including The New Republic, the National Review, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Defense News, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. He appears frequently as a commentator on National Public Radio's "Day to Day" program and on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Sneider served as Tokyo Correspondent (1985-1990) and Moscow Bureau Chief (1990-1994) for the Christian Science Monitor, and as National Foreign Editor (1998-2003) for the San Jose Mercury News. He received his B.A. from Columbia University and an M.P.A. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Sneider was a visiting fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Stanford Institute for International Studies in 1994-1995. While in residence at APARC, he will research the interaction between generational change and alliance management in Northeast Asia, with particular focus on Korea.

Based in Washington, DC, Scott Snyder is a senior associate in the international relations program at the Asia Foundation, and in the Pacific Forum of the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS). From 2000 to 2004, he lived in Seoul, South Korea as the Asia Foundation's Korea Representative. His publications include Paved With Good Intentions: The NGO Experience in North Korea (2003), co-edited with L. Gordon Flake, and Negotiating on the Edge: North Korean Negotiating Behavior (1999). Snyder received his B.A. from Rice University and an M.A. from the Regional Studies East Asia Program at Harvard University. He was the recipient of an Abe Fellowship, administered by the Social Sciences Research Council, in 1998-1999, and was a Thomas G. Watson Fellow at Yonsei University in South Korea in 1987-1988. While in residence at APARC, he will research the transformation of the Sino-South Korean relationship and its implications for the U.S.-South Korea security alliance.

In May, North Korean leaders hinted to visiting U.S scholar John W. Lewis that they're willing to resume negotiations with the United States on nuclear arms. But if those talks are revived, North Korea wants to focus on mutual steps toward a denuclearized Korean peninsula. The Bush administration has said repeatedly it doesn't want to depart from six-way nuclear talks. (Mike Shuster's full report on NPR's Morning Edition is linked below.)

Daniel Sneider writes, "There is a small crack in the otherwise closed door between the United States and North Korea. That is part of the message Stanford Professor John W. Lewis, an expert on Northeast Asian security issues, brought back this past week from a visit to China and North Korea." (Sneider's column, "Window is closing for U.S. in N. Korean nuclear talks," is linked below.)

May 2005 opened with a bleak couple of weeks for the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Delegates from 189 countries struggled to settle on an agenda for the seventh 5-year review of the Treaty, North Korea announced a new extraction of plutonium from its reactor to make nuclear weapons, and Iran stood firm against European attempts to dissuade it from pursuing a nuclear energy program that could be diverted for weapons-making. Yet CISAC's George Bunn, in an interview with BBC's "The World," cautioned against despair.

As the first general counsel to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Bunn has watched the NPT weather many diplomatic storms since it entered into force in 1970. Far from a failure, the treaty prevented nuclear weapons from becoming a commonplace in nations' defense programs, he said.

"I think that if there were no NPT, there would be something like 35 to 40 countries with nuclear weapons," Bunn explained. "When you think that at the time of our negotiations in the 60s, Sweden and Switzerland both had programs to explore the possibility of making nuclear weapons"--ambitions that the NPT helped dissuade--the treaty has provided incalculable benefits to world security. "If Sweden and Switzerland had nuclear weapons, think how many other countries would have them," he added.

Today the treaty's main weakness is its focus on states' possession of nuclear weapons, at a time when terrorists' ambitions to acquire the weapons is a major concern. At the treaty's outset, "terrorism wasn't perceived by us as a threat. The treaty hardly deals with the threat of terrorism," Bunn said.

The radio interview with George Bunn and his son Matthew Bunn, also a nuclear arms expert, is available at the link below. (Windows Media Player is required.)

Hans Blix, chairman of the International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction and former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, said at the Stanford Institute for International Studies' International Day, "Challenges in a New Era," on May 6 that he does not think the world faces a new nuclear arms race. Nuclear risks posed by terrorists and nations like Iran and North Korea could trigger a new nuclear arms race, warned CISAC Co-Director and Stanford professor Scott D. Sagan.

Blix said that there need not be a new arms race if the world diligently pursues diplomacy. Blix's speech attracted a strong response from Sagan, who participated in the same plenary panel titled "Looking Ahead: A New Nuclear Arms Race?" "I think there already is a new and very different kind of nuclear arms race going on," Sagan said. "It is a race between terrorists trying to develop a nuclear weapon and national and international efforts to stop that." As North Korea "race[s] ahead with its own persistent and provocative nuclear program," Sagan said the likelihood that the impoverished country will want to test its weapons or sell them to the highest bidder will increase. "I think Dr. Blix's paper greatly underestimates the threat of nuclear terrorism today," he said.

The exchange was one of many during the one day International Day that attracted hundreds of diplomats, policymakers, faculty and students. Other speakers included Oxford professor Paul Collier, the State Department counselor, Philip Zelikow, and Stonebridge International chairman, Samuel Berger. Zelikow and Berger both spoke on U.S. foreign policy.

The SIIS International Day also included discussion session on topics such as Russia's future, U.S. policy on the Korean peninsula, climate change, our energy future, United Nations reform, responses to infectious diseases, U.S.-European relations, and international criminal justice and security. Participants included both Stanford faculty and invited scholars, policymakers, and journalists.

Coit D. Blacker, director of SIIS, said the International Day, an annual event, will become part of the university's newly launched International Initiative that promotes interdisciplinary research and teaching. He also said the Stanford Institute for International Studies will be renamed the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, effective September 1, in recognition of alumni Bradford Freeman, a member of the university's Board of Trustees, and Ronald Spogli, a member of the SIIS board of visitors, who together donated a lead gift of $50 million to help launch the initiative last month.