North Korean Nuclear Crisis: Six-Way Talks Simulation Debriefing

"Behind the great conflicts of mankind, there is a terrible predicament which lies at the heart of the story" (Butterfield, 20). With the advent of the nuclear weapon, this predicament - the dilemma of state security - has proven more dangerous than ever before, and since the use of the first nuclear bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear debates have consistently preoccupied the global political stage. Tension has prevailed in the North Korean nuclear dilemma. In efforts to resolve the conflict, diplomacy, through the Six-way talks, has proved to be an avenue of only rarely effective cooperation. Histories of these six states dating back to the pre-Cold War era largely affect the current underlying alliance systems that exist in the region. Trust conflicts have carried over from historical tensions into current diplomatic relations - mainly the Six-way talks - and hinder the progress of such diplomacy, as played out in the in-class simulation and the real world.