This thesis evaluates three U.S. policy options for North Korean nuclear weapons: incentive-based diplomacy, coercive diplomacy, or military force. It analyzes them according to four criteria: the impact on North Korea's nuclear weapons, the impact on its neighbors (China, Japan, and South Korea), U.S. policy costs, and the precedent for future proliferation. This thesis shows that diplomacy will fail to achieve U.S. objectives for three reasons: lack of trust, DPRK reluctance to permit transparency, and the difficulty of conducting multilateral coercive diplomacy. Ultimately, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's question must be answered: "What price is the United States willing to pay to disarm North Korean nuclear weapons?" If Washington is unwilling to back a threat of military force, it should not risk coercive diplomacy. Likewise, U.S. leaders may need to decide between maintaining the U.S.-ROK alliance and eliminating North Korean nuclear weapons.

On June 29, 1950, the U.S. launched its first ever air strikes on the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, marking the start of what would become the longest conflict in history between two industrial powers. Four decades later, the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of a new phase of the conflict, with a new unipolar world order centered on the power of the U.S. and Western world leaving North Korea in unprecedented isolation. Now unsupported in its fight against a Western superpower intent on its destruction, the small but technologically adept and heavily militarized East Asian state would need to adopt more radical measures to ensure its security. Over the next 35 years, the conflict would transform from a period of North Korean decline in the face of tremendous economic and military pressure, to one of an ascent in its power and decline in the West as international order evolved past the unipolar era Surviving the Unipolar Era elucidates the conflict’s transformation, beginning with unprecedented U.S.-led efforts to achieve North Korea’s total collapse and elimination through maximum pressure, and ending three decades later with a subsiding of Pyongyang’s international isolation and the modernization of its economy, armed forces and nuclear deterrent. A. B. Abrams highlights how the small state has been able to hold its own in multiple standoffs with the world’s superpower, successfully weather economic sanctions, and prevent penetration of its information space, and the implications that this has had for the country, the region and the wider world. He details the strong consistency in American objectives, and the evolution of consensus across five separate administrations on how these should be pursued as the circumstances of the conflict transformed. In the context of prevailing geopolitical, economic and security trends, Abrams projects the future course of the conflict including aspects such as Western difficulties coming to terms with North Korea’s ascent, U.S. policy priorities going forward, and the growing opportunities that an emerging new global cold war is likely to provide Pyongyang.

This paper combines three separate threads of analysis on culture and violent nonstate actors as a launching pad to spur further research into this critical arena of culture and security. Jim Smith lays out a series of templates for guiding analysis of culture and violent nonstate actors. Mark Long applies cultural analysis of radical Islam and alQaida in discussing the influences involved in the core al Qaida group's WMD decisions. Tom Johnson, in examining a tribal insurgent psychological campaign in Afghanistan, demonstrates that behavioral influences can be manipulated for significant effect in countering our efforts to gain stability and legitimacy for the Afghan government. James M. Smith, PhD, is the Director, USAF Institute for National Security Studies and Professor, Military Strategic Studies at the US Air Force Academy.Jerry Mark Long, PhD, is Associate Professor and Director, Middle East Studies, Honors College, Baylor University. Thomas H. Johnson is Research Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.

This concise introduction to the growth and evolution of geopolitics as a discipline includes biographical information on its leading historical and contemporary practitioners and detailed analysis of its literature. An important book on a topic that has been neglected for too long, Geopolitics: A Guide to the Issues will provide readers with an enhanced understanding of how geography influences personal, national, and international economics, politics, and security. The work begins with the history of geopolitics from the late 19th century to the present, then discusses the intellectual renaissance the discipline is experiencing today due to the prevalence of international security threats involving territorial, airborne, space-based, and waterborne possession and acquisition. The book emphasizes current and emerging international geopolitical trends, examining how the U.S. and other countries, including Australia, Brazil, China, India, and Russia, are integrating geopolitics into national security planning. It profiles international geopolitical scholars and their work, and it analyzes emerging academic, military, and governmental literature, including "gray" literature and social networking technologies, such as blogs and Twitter.

In this paper, the author differentiates and characterizes terrorists and insurgents, and he conducts a detailed conceptual and historical analysis of insurgency and its current manifestation on a global scale by the Salafi Jihad movement. This work lays out the case that terrorism and insurgency differ, and that the current "long war" is actually being fought by the other side as an insurgency. As a result, the United States must amend and adapt its strategy to one of global counterinsurgency, beyond a global war on terrorism alone.

Pat Carlen's compelling and compassionate analysis of the penal control of women at the end of the twentieth century is based on new research completed in 1997. She develops many of the themes of previous work, while introducing new concepts such as 'gender-testing', and 'ameliorative justice'. Skilfully and vividly presenting the words and views of both staff and inmates of the women's prisons, Carlen presents a powerful case for both a quantitative and qualitative reduction in women's imprisonment.