Energy and Security in Northeast Asia is a three-part series of papers showing that there are unrealized gains to be had from multilateral cooperation on energy issues. Such cooperation is the goal of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation’s Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an informal track-two discussion exploring the potential for cooperation on security issues among China, Japan, Russia, the Republic of Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the United States. Many papers in this collection first were presented to a September 1996 NEACD workshop on Northeast Asian energy and security held in Seoul, Korea. That workshop offered participating government officials and private experts an opportunity to explore the ramifications of increasing energy demand on future relations among their countries. After the workshop, IGCC solicited additional papers to analyze the basic premises among our initial contributions.

Gaining access to energy resources has long been a source of contention among established and rising powers. IGCC Policy Papers 35-37, Energy and Security in Northeast Asia, examine the significance of Northeast Asia's rising energy demands on regional and global energy and security politics.

Policy Paper 37 introduces prominent proposals for multilateral Northeast Asian nuclear energy cooperation advanced by Kaneko Kumao, Suzuki Atsuyuki and Jor- Shan Choi (an analysis by Suzuki Tatsujiro about lessons from the European experience (EURATOM) appeared in IGCC Policy Paper 24, Energy and Security in Northeast Asia). Cooperation on nuclear energy would have a direct impact on political and security relations among Northeast Asian states. Nuclear power is an attractive alternative for all the Northeast Asian states, especially Japan and South Korea, which have no energy resources of their own and have to import all their fuels. Nuclear energy is much cleaner than that extracted from fossil fuels, and it is a symbol of technological modernity.

The paper includes brief policy memos commissioned for the March 1994 IGCC conference, "The United States and Japan in Asia." Issue areas included politics and security, economics, science, technology, and the environment, and humna rights.