1. 21st Century Complete Guide to North Korea and the Regime of Kim Jong-il
DPRK Nuclear and Missile Programs, with Material from the DOD, Military, Congress, the White House, CIA Factbook, and Library of Congress Country Studies - State Department and U.S. Policy on North Korea (Core Federal Information Series)
by U.S. Government (CD-ROM with Over 91,000 pages)
Book Description
This CD-ROM provides comprehensive information on North Korea (known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, DPRK) and the current regime of Kim Jong-il, including the threat posed by its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. This up-to-date and comprehensive CD-ROM provides an unparalleled collection of official federal documents and publications on all aspects of North Korea. There is extensive material from the State Department, Department of Defense, many branches of the military, the White House, Congress (House and Senate) and Congressional testimony, and the Energy Department. Relevant portions of the 2002 CIA World Factbook and the Library of Congress Country Studies series provides informative background information. Read more...
Book Description
Nearly half a century after the fighting stopped, the 1953 Armistice has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War. While Russia and China withdrew the last of their forces in 1958, the United States maintains 37,000 troops in South Korea and is pledged to defend it with nuclear weapons. In Korean Endgame, Selig Harrison mounts the first authoritative challenge to this long-standing U.S. policy.
Harrison shows why North Korea is not--as many policymakers expect--about to collapse. And he explains why existing U.S. policies hamper North-South reconciliation and reunification. Assessing North Korean capabilities and the motivations that have led to its forward deployments, he spells out the arms control concessions by North Korea, South Korea, and the United States necessary to ease the dangers of confrontation, centering on reciprocal U.S. force redeployments and U.S. withdrawals in return for North Korean pullbacks from the thirty-eighth parallel. Read more...
From the Back Cover
Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Korea and East Asia, this book provides a comprehensive and balanced introduction to contemporary Korean politics. It explicates the great changes in South Korea, which has gone from being one of the poorest nations to a proud member of the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation while making the transition to democracy. Read more...
Book Description
North Korea, despite a shattered economy and a populace suffering from widespread hunger, has outlived repeated forecasts of its imminent demise. Charles K. Armstrong contends that a major source of North Korea's strength and resiliency, as well as of its flaws and shortcomings, lies in the poorly understood origins of its system of government. He examines the genesis of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) both as an important yet rarely studied example of a communist state and as part of modern Korean history.
North Korea is one of the last redoubts of "unreformed" Marxism-Leninism in the world. Yet it is not a Soviet satellite in the East European manner, nor is its government the result of a local revolution, as in Cuba and Vietnam. Instead, the DPRK represents a unique "indigenization" of Soviet Stalinism, Armstrong finds. The system that formed under the umbrella of the Soviet occupation quickly developed into a nationalist regime as programs initiated from above merged with distinctive local conditions. Read more...
Book Description
A terrible famine struck the most reclusive society on earth in 1994. Over the next five years, while the North Korean regime tried to hide the dreadful reality and the international community tried hard not to look, perhaps as many as 3 million people starved to death.
In this powerful, provocative book, Andrew Natsios asks three overarching questions: What do we know about the origins and extent of the famine? Why did donor governments and organizations not do more to help? What are the consequences of the famine for North Korea and the lessons for the international community?
In the search for answers, Natsios supplements the scanty store of published sources by drawing on the testimony of thousands of refugees, on thousands of e-mails he received while heading an NGO effort to aid the victims, and on his own encounters with officials from North Korea as well as from Western governments. The picture he presents is a disturbing one: human misery on a biblical scale, a paranoid regime that sacrificed its own citizens to ideological rigidity and pride, and foreign governments that subordinated humanitarian impulses to political and diplomatic interests. Read more...
Book Description
"No one can presume to predict the near term future of North Korea-implosion, explosion, gradual assimilation into the Asian community of nations, peaceful reunification with the South, or continuing down the current path of a hermit nation-isolated and struggling to survive. We can predict with certainty that insights into what drives this nation of 23 million people, a focus of U.S. defense planning for 50 years, will continue to be important to U.S. national interests for years to come. Kongdan (Katy) Oh and Ralph Hassig have made a rich contribution to meeting the need for these insights with a view through the looking glass into the mystery that is North Korea. This is an important book, readable and profound. It is worthy of the careful study and attention of those who want to better understand the global environment that shapes and permeates our own future." - General Larry D. Welch, President, Institute for Defense Analyses. Read more...
Amazon.com -Editorial Review
Bruce Cumings traces the growth of Korea from a string of competing walled city-states to its present dual nationhood. He examines the ways in which Korean culture has been influenced by Japan and China, and the ways in which it has subtly influenced its more powerful neighbors. Cumings also considers the recent changes in the South, where authoritarianism is giving way to democracy, and in the North, which Cumings depicts as a "socialist corporatist" state more like a neo-Confucian kingdom than a Stalinist regime. Korea's Place in the Sun does much to help Western readers understand the complexities of Korea's past and present. Read more...
12. The Future of North Korea
(Politics in Asia)
by Tsuneo Akahara and Tsuneo Akaha (Library Binding)
Book Description
This collection of essays by noted scholars of Asian security examines the perspectives and interests of North and South Korea, the United States, China, Russia and Japan regarding North Korea's future, including the possibility of neutrality. Read more...
13. The End of North Korea
by Nick Eberstadt, Nicholas Eberstadt (Hardcover - September 1999)
Book Description
In "The End of North Korea", master demographer Nicholas Eberstadt reveals fateful indicators for North Korea. Read more...
Book Description
After the collapse of the Soviet world North Korea alone has continued on the rigid communist way, in spite of its economic consequences leading the state beyond ruin to famine. What are the reasons behind this peculiar choice of direction? Why did the leaders in Pyongyang pursue a policy abandoned not only by the Soviet Union but also by China and Vietnam? The author of this book spent three years as head of the embassy of Sweden in Pyongyang. Until a few years ago it was the only western embassy in North Korea. His unique experiences are related with descriptions of day-to-day life and with analyses of economic, political and ideological conditions. A picture is drawn of a society and a political order that defy both human nature and common sense. Read more...
