| Dear Friends and Colleagues,
March was a busy month in the Asia-Pacific with heightened tensions in the South China Sea, the ASEAN-Australia special summit, and further DPRK ballistic missile tests.
At APLN, we focused on examining the drivers of nuclear risk in Northeast Asia and how the region’s major players – Japan, South Korea, the US, China, and North Korea – can address them in the publication of our report What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe authored by Van Jackson. It was published as part of our project on Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Use in Northeast Asia.
March also saw the launch of our Asia-Pacific Women in International Security Database, which now includes over 150 female experts, including APLN’s two newest senior network members, Maria Rost Rublee and Tanya Ogilvie-White. Our ambition is to promote female Asia-Pacific experts regionally and internationally in the media and in foreign and defence policy debates.
We also published several analyses including a two-part research series by Anna Hood and Monique Cormier examining the international legality of threats to use nuclear weapons, and a paper on how North Korea’s technical capabilities and nuclear strategy could evolve by Anastasia Barannikova.
Finally, we announced our upcoming webinar on The Search for Nuclear Justice, a joint event with BASIC’s Emerging Voices Network on Wednesday 17 April. I hope you will be able to join us.
Thank you for your ongoing support of APLN and as always I welcome your feedback on our work. |
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| Kind regards,
Shatabhisha Shetty
APLN Executive Director |
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What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe
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| Image: Byungdug Jun, Image processing of aerial photographs taken by the U.S. military before and after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki (Part 1), Journal of the Japan Society for Digital Archive, Vol.6, No.s3, pp.s238-s241, 2022. |
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| In the third-year report in APLN’s joint project on Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Use in Northeast Asia, Van Jackson determines that Northeast Asia is a region of “nuclear precarity” due to nuclear expansion programs, increasing reliance on coercive military signaling toward rivals, and evolving nuclear postures and doctrines.
The report includes a series of pragmatic policy proposals directed towards the governments of Japan, South Korea, the United States, China, and North Korea to help avert nuclear escalation in the region and work together to ensure that the world never sees another Nagasaki or Hiroshima.
There will be an online launch event for this report on Tuesday 23 April from 9:00am KST to 10:30am KST. The event will feature report author Van Jackson, who will discuss the findings and recommendations in detail alongside a panel of experts. Please register for the event here. |
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| The APLN-RECNA-Nautilus Institute joint project “Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapon Use in Northeast Asia” (NU-NEA) works to define use cases for nuclear weapons in a limited nuclear war on, or involving, the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia more broadly. The aim is to assist policymakers in identifying ways to avoid a nuclear conflict as well as to de-escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia by developing credible nuclear use cases and proposing policy solutions. |
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Asia-Pacific Women in International Security Database
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| On 11 March, APLN launched the Asia-Pacific Women in International Security Database.
The women included are based in the Asia-Pacific and work on issues related to foreign policy, defence, and peace and security. The database can be filtered by regional expertise, thematic expertise, language skills, and nationality.
Since the database launched in early March, we have added over 150 experts from 25 countries. We hope that this database serves as a tool for journalists and policy practitioners to use when seeking women in the field of international security to consult with for upcoming articles, interviews, or other related work.
All names were added entirely on an opt-in basis; if you would like to be listed in the database, please fill out this form. We welcome your feedback at apln@apln.network. |
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Global Nuclear Order in the Asia-Pacific
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| Pictured, left to right: Michiru Nishida, Tong Zhao, Duyeon Kim, James McKeon, Joel Petersson Ivre, Tanya Ogilvie-White, Mark Melamed, Lynn Rusten, Chungin Moon, Steve Andreasen, Shata Shetty, Jiang Tianjiao, Ankit Panda, Tyler Kim, MinHee Chang |
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| On 4-5 March, APLN gathered in Seoul for a workshop focused on managing strategic risks and nuclear dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region with the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).
The workshop brought together experts from the US and the region and is part of NTI’s project on the Global Nuclear Order, which considers implications of current geopolitical developments for the global nuclear order and the broader international security environment. |
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APLN welcomed two new members to its senior network in March:
- Dr. Maria Rost Rublee (Australia), Professor of International Relations at the University of Melbourne
- Dr. Tanya Ogilvie-White (Aotearoa New Zealand), Senior Research Adviser at the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network
APLN now has 157 members from 22 countries across the Asia-Pacific. |
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We are delighted to welcome MinHee Chang Oh to the team, who joined APLN in March as our new Operations Manager. MinHee manages APLN’s general operations and human resource matters and also works with the Executive Director on governance, fundraising and finances.
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| 1 March | Anna Hood and Monique Cormier examine the international legality of threats to use nuclear weapons. In part 1 of this two-part series, the authors review existing prohibitions against nuclear weapons in international law and determine whether they can be applied to threats of nuclear use. |
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| 7 March | Meenakshi Gopinath argues the need for gender mainstreaming in the disarmament agenda. While women have become more regular fixtures in the nuclear security space in recent years, there is nevertheless a need to engage in constant “reframing” of the movement: stopping to evaluate progress, reset priorities, and consider whether discussions are truly inclusive of all those who are affected by nuclear weapons. |
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| 8 March | Anna Hood and Monique Cormier examine the international legality of threats to use nuclear weapons. In part 2 of this two-part series, the authors consider prominent examples of nuclear threats and determine whether they were lawful under the international laws that govern when states can use force against one another. |
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| 14 March | Anastasia Barannikova analyses North Korea’s nuclear strategy and considers how it might evolve. Barannikova combines North Korea’s stated nuclear doctrine with an analysis of its technical capabilities to determine where the DPRK’s nuclear program stands and what it is capable of. |
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| 27 March | Jun Bong-geun gives three recommendations for how to reduce tension on the Korean Peninsula, where he says that North and South Korea have been locked in a zero-sum security competition that has made the region more prone to war. |
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